A recent decision by the Bavarian data protection authority raises serious doubts about whether the popular email marketing platform MailChimp can be used legally under the GDPR. By extension, the same problem arises for almost all US software applications that process personal data of EU citizens. After all, data export to the US has been …
Every so many time yet another new social media platform pops up that, according to insiders and early adopters, is going to change the internet. The success of the Snapchats and TikToks in this world has two things in common: on the one hand, their success often fades just as quickly as their hype has …
Images and other content that is publicly available on the Internet are also protected by copyright. All too often we are contacted by people who have received a hefty invoice from an angry (rightly or wrongly) photographer because they copied his image on their website without permission. The photographer works hard to make a good …
The European Commission has imposed a 7,8 million euro fine to Valve, owner of the online PC gaming platform “Steam”, and five video game distributors for violating European geoblocking rules. Valve and the affected distributors restricted cross-border sales of certain video games based on the geographic location of consumers, which is exactly what is prohibited …
An upcoming judgment of the Court of Justice may have interesting consequences for companies operating in a cross-border context. In a recent opinion on the case of the Belgian Data Protection Authority (DPA) against Facebook, the Advocate General of the Court of Justice wrote that ‘the DPA of the country in which the registered office …
Last week Sirius Legal met with the Belgian Data Protection Authorty as the legal representative of the united Belgian digital industry about the use of analytics cookies. On 7 January sector organizations ACC, BAM, Cube, Feweb, SafeShops.be, UBA and UMA (representing agencies, advertisers, web builders and webshops) met with Belgium’s DPA to convey their concerns …
In the beginning of this year, the EURid (the organisation in charge of managing .eu domain names) announced that 81,000 .eu domain names would be suspended as a result of Brexit. Those domain name holders now have three months to prove that they are entitled to the .eu domain name. This event is a perfect …
2020 was a turbulent year for the entire world for obvious reasons, but also specifically when it comes to GDPR the year did not go unnoticed. Anyone who has followed our blog in the past year has undoubtedly noticed that many companies throughout Europe have been fined, sometimes very high. Google, Amazon, Marriott, Ticketmaster, H&M, …
Just before the holiday season, on December 15, EC Vice President Margrethe Vestager announced the first drafts of the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act. These are 2 new European regulations that together form the Digital Service Package and that should ensure more and better regulation of online platforms in the foreseeable future. …
An important principle that companies must take into account when processing personal data is the principle of storage limitation. According to that principle you have the obligation to organise the “data lifecycle” of the personal data that you process and, more specifically, to set and monitor maximum retention periods for those personal data. It is …