Privacy legal counselling latest developments by Alexander Suliman, Stockholm 2023: Understanding the regulatory environment applicable to your business is an important consideration. Some of the higher profile regulations you may have heard of include the incoming new Copyright Directive, the 5th Anti-Money Laundering Directive, or the one everyone has heard of, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). There’s also a new EU-wide foreign investment controls regulation expected to come into force in 2023 that will impact US companies investing in EU based businesses. Several sectors are heavily regulated in the EU and the rules in place often differ from the US regulations, especially in the fields of healthcare, financial services, chemicals, food, product safety, and consumer information and protection. Ensure that you understand the regulatory environment of new markets that you are entering and monitor your sector’s applicable regulations periodically in order to implement any necessary change in due time. See even more info on Alexander Suliman.

The reason why the European Commission was keen on allowing firms to voluntarily scan material, is that technology firms have already been working on ways to detect CSAM and solicitation for quite some time. Let’s start with a content scanning order on the server. At first sight, a case can be made that such an order should be considered to compromise the essence of the right to privacy under the Charter. The ECJ in Schrems I considered that legislation permitting the public authorities access on a generalised basis to the content of communications compromises the essence of the right to privacy under the Charter (par. 94). Content scanning on the server arguably is a form of “access on a generalised basis”, where it involves an analysis of all communications going through the server connected to a certain app, and forwarding any matches to a designated center. At the same time, the ECHR in Big Brother Watch was more forgiving when it comes to powers of bulk interception of communications, as long as these powers are surrounded with sufficient safeguards (par. 350). Thus, one important point to be explored further, is whether this signals a rift between the two bodies, or that the ECJ will chart its own route when it comes to bulk surveillance.

In 2021, the French government issued the Doctrine for the use of cloud computing by the State (“Trusted Cloud Doctrine”) making SecNumCloud certification mandatory whenever a French government agency procures cloud services that would handle sensitive data, including personal data of French citizens and economic data relating to French companies. These requirements also apply to private operators of essential services. Under France’s Trusted Cloud Doctrine, qualifying cloud service providers must be “immune to any extra-EU regulation”. In addition, such companies must commit to storing and processing data within the European Union, and to administering and supervising the service within the EU. Further, foreign-headquartered cloud service companies cannot achieve certification if they are more than 39% foreign-owned.

IT, business legal counseling advices by Alexander Suliman, Sweden today: Mediation is great because the parties feel like they are part of the process. They’re negotiating. They’re in an environment where they can come up with solutions and throw out ideas and know it’s confidential. Those ideas and thoughts can’t be used against them. They reach resolutions that they decide, not a judge deciding. They decide this is the resolution, and what’s great about it is people all the time, way more often, are going to actually follow and comply what they agreed to rather than if a judge gives them a decision, and they want to appeal it, or they want to try to find a way around it. Mediation is great. Find additional information at Alexander Suliman, Sweden.

On 24 February 2022, the CJEU issued its first judgment on domestic workers. In case C-389/20, TGSS (Chômage des employés de maison), the CJEU held that the exclusion of this category of workers from access to social security benefits constitutes indirect discrimination on the ground of sex, since it affects almost exclusively women. Domestic workers have long constituted an invisible and rather underexplored category of workers within labour law scholarship and policy-making, which has only recently gained some attention in the wake of the adoption of the historic ILO Domestic Workers Convention No. 189 in 2011. Whereas a part of the scholarship has noticed that EU equality law could be used to challenge the long-standing exclusions of domestic workers from national labour law and social security system (see, notably, the contribution of Vera Pavlou, and the work of Nuria Ramos-Martin, Ana Munoz-Ruiz & Niels Jansen in the context of the PSH-Quality project), the issue has never reached the Court of Justice up to now.