What is it about?
EU Data Protection Agencies have been vigorously enforcing violations of regional and national data protection law in recent years against U.S. tech companies, but few changes have been made to their business model of exchanging free services for personal data. The European Union's new data privacy laws -- the GDPR -- which provides users with new rights and backs these up with substantial potential sanctions, will require adaptation by U.S. tech companies such as Google and Facebook that have been operating for well over a decade with very loose restrictions under U.S. law. Will the GDPR be the end of Google and Facebook or will it be embraced as the gold standard of how companies ought to operate?
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Why is it important?
In this article, the authors explore differences in EU and U.S. data privacy laws in terms of ideology, enforcement actions, and the laws themselves, placing this in the context of the new requirements for tech companies of the GDPR.
Perspectives
I think that this article is important because it crosses the Atlantic, so to speak. Europeans might not realize the context in which U.S. tech companies have "grown up," and Americans might not be award of the enforcement actions taken by the Europeans against Google and Facebook, and the different protections EU law offers individuals. At a time when the U.S. is discussing potential new federal data privacy legislation, this is important.
W. Gregory Voss
Toulouse Business School
While the Facebook and Google business model of personal data in exchange for free services is legal in the U.S., it has long been a point of contention in the EU. This article explains the differences in enforcement actions between the two blocks and provides an explanation on how the GDPR will apply to this business model.
Assistant Professor Kimberly Houser
Oklahoma State University System
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: GDPR: The End of Google and Facebook or a New Paradigm in Data Privacy?, SSRN Electronic Journal, January 2018, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3212210.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Gregory VOSS on Facebook & Google Data Protection
Co-author Gregory Voss briefly discusses the history of Facebook and Google data protection violations in the context of the European Union's new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the GDPR's impact on Facebook and Google.
Can Facebook and Google survive the GDPR?
This is an introduction to the article written by its co-authors, which originally appeared in Oxford Law Faculty's Oxford Business Law Blog.
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