scholarly journals A System to Access Online Services with Minimal Personal Information Disclosure

Author(s):  
Antonia Russo ◽  
Gianluca Lax ◽  
Baptiste Dromard ◽  
Menad Mezred

AbstractThe General Data Protection Regulation highlights the principle of data minimization, which means that only data required to successfully accomplish a given task should be processed. In this paper, we propose a Blockchain-based scheme that allows users to have control over the personal data revealed when accessing a service. The proposed solution does not rely on sophisticated cryptographic primitives, provides mechanisms for revoking the authorization to access a service and for guessing the identity of a user only in cases of need, and is compliant with the recent eIDAS Regulation. We prove that the proposed scheme is secure and reaches the expected goal, and we present an Ethereum-based implementation to show the effectiveness of the proposed solution.

Author(s):  
Tapiwa V Warikandwa

The contemporary global financial services market has witnessed a substantial increase in cybercrime which places consumers’ personal data at risk. Rapid increases in cybercrime linked to the financial services market have driven financial market regulators to pass novel laws and regulations aimed at curbing the rate of occurrence of cybercrimes connected to personal data sharing. To that end, banks and/or financial services companies in Europe have swiftly moved to comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. Whilst personal data protection regulation is not a new concept in Europe, most African countries (with exception of South Africa) do not have laws and regulations on personal data protection. With the financial services market being extremely vulnerable to cyber risks owing to the digitisation of the financial services sector, it is important to assess the suitability of South Africa’s current regulatory framework concerning the protection of personal data. This article thus examines South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 with a view to ascertaining its suitability and/or adequacy in protecting personal data in the country’s financial services market. With the global Covid-19 pandemic bringing about concerns related to rapid increases in cyber-attacks in the financial services market owing to the increased sharing of the sensitive personal data of consumers, there is also need to test the POPIA’s conformity with the strict European Union GDPR personal data protection guidelines.


Author(s):  
Jabier Martinez ◽  
Alejandra Ruiz ◽  
Javier Puelles ◽  
Ibon Arechalde ◽  
Yuliya Miadzvetskaya

Abstract The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was conceived to remove the obstacles to the free movement of personal data while ensuring the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of such data. The Smart Grid has similar features as any privacy-critical system but, in comparison to the engineering of other architectures, has the peculiarity of being the source of energy consumption data. Electricity consumption constitutes an indirect means to infer personal information. This work looks at the Smart Grid from the perspective of the GDPR, which is especially relevant now given the current growth and diversification of the Smart Grid ecosystem. We provide a review of existing works highlighting the importance of energy consumption as valuable personal data as well as an analysis of the established Smart Grid Architecture Model and its main challenges from a legal viewpoint, in particular the challenge of sharing data with third parties.


Author(s):  
Anneliese Roos

After a lengthy legislative process, South Africa implemented the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPI Act) on 1 July 2020. The POPI Act is an omnibus data-protection Act that conforms to the former benchmark for data-protection laws worldwide, namely, the 1995 EU Data Protection Directive. At the time of drafting the proposed Bill that would later become the Act, the South African Law Reform Commission emphasised the importance of a South African data-protection Act that complies with international standards on data protection, especially with the EU’s Directive. The Directive, in Article 25, imposed a prohibition on the transfer of personal data to non-member countries that do not ensure an adequate level of protection when personal data of their citizens are processed. South Africa’s Act needed to comply with the standard set in the Directive for the protection of personal information if South Africa wanted to remain part of the international information technology market. In 2016, the EU adopted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that replaced the 1995 Directive with effect from May 2018. The question now arises whether the South African Act still meets the minimum standards for data protection set out by this Regulation and whether amendments to the Act are needed. This article compares certain provisions of the GDPR with similar provisions of the POPI Act in order to establish whether the South African Act meets the standard set in the GDPR.


AJIL Unbound ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 114 ◽  
pp. 31-34
Author(s):  
Nani Jansen Reventlow

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes important transparency and accountability requirements on different actors who process personal data. This is great news for the protection of individual data privacy. However, given that “personal information and human stories are the raw material of journalism,” what does the GDPR mean for freedom of expression and especially for journalistic activity? This essay argues that, although EU states seem to have taken their data protection obligations under the GDPR seriously, efforts to balance this against the right to freedom of expression have been more uneven. The essay concludes that it is of key importance to ensure that the GDPR's safeguards for data privacy do not compromise a free press.


Author(s):  
Raphaël Gellert

The main goal of this book is to provide an understanding of what is commonly referred to as “the risk-based approach to data protection”. An expression that came to the fore during the overhaul process of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)—even though it can also be found in other statutes under different acceptations. At its core it consists in endowing the regulated organisation that process personal data with increased responsibility for complying with data protection mandates. Such increased compliance duties are performed through risk management tools. It addresses this topic from various perspectives. In framing the risk-based approach as the latest model of a series of regulation models, the book provides an analysis of data protection law from the perspective of regulation theory as well as risk and risk management literatures, and their mutual interlinkages. Further, it provides an overview of the policy developments that led to the adoption of such an approach, which it discusses in the light of regulation theory. It also includes various discussions pertaining to the risk-based approach’s scope and meaning, to the way it has been uptaken in statutes including key provisions such as accountability and data protection impact assessments, or to its potential and limitations. Finally, it analyses how the risk-based approach can be implemented in practice by providing technical analyses of various data protection risk management methodologies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 4537
Author(s):  
Christian Delgado-von-Eitzen ◽  
Luis Anido-Rifón ◽  
Manuel J. Fernández-Iglesias

Blockchain technologies are awakening in recent years the interest of different actors in various sectors and, among them, the education field, which is studying the application of these technologies to improve information traceability, accountability, and integrity, while guaranteeing its privacy, transparency, robustness, trustworthiness, and authenticity. Different interesting proposals and projects were launched and are currently being developed. Nevertheless, there are still issues not adequately addressed, such as scalability, privacy, and compliance with international regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe. This paper analyzes the application of blockchain technologies and related challenges to issue and verify educational data and proposes an innovative solution to tackle them. The proposed model supports the issuance, storage, and verification of different types of academic information, both formal and informal, and complies with applicable regulations, protecting the privacy of users’ personal data. This proposal also addresses the scalability challenges and paves the way for a global academic certification system.


Author(s):  
Michael Veale ◽  
Reuben Binns ◽  
Lilian Edwards

Many individuals are concerned about the governance of machine learning systems and the prevention of algorithmic harms. The EU's recent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been seen as a core tool for achieving better governance of this area. While the GDPR does apply to the use of models in some limited situations, most of its provisions relate to the governance of personal data, while models have traditionally been seen as intellectual property. We present recent work from the information security literature around ‘model inversion’ and ‘membership inference’ attacks, which indicates that the process of turning training data into machine-learned systems is not one way, and demonstrate how this could lead some models to be legally classified as personal data. Taking this as a probing experiment, we explore the different rights and obligations this would trigger and their utility, and posit future directions for algorithmic governance and regulation. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Governing artificial intelligence: ethical, legal, and technical opportunities and challenges’.


2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 284-307
Author(s):  
Giovanni Comandè ◽  
Giulia Schneider

Abstract Health data are the most special of the ‘special categories’ of data under Art. 9 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The same Art. 9 GDPR prohibits, with broad exceptions, the processing of ‘data concerning health’. Our thesis is that, through data mining technologies, health data have progressively undergone a process of distancing from the healthcare sphere as far as the generation, the processing and the uses are concerned. The case study aims thus to test the endurance of the ‘special category’ of health data in the face of data mining technologies and the never-ending lifecycles of health data they feed. At a more general level of analysis, the case of health data shows that data mining techniques challenge core data protection notions, such as the distinction between sensitive and non-sensitive personal data, requiring a shift in terms of systemic perspectives that the GDPR only partly addresses.


Hypertension ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 1029-1035
Author(s):  
Antonia Vlahou ◽  
Dara Hallinan ◽  
Rolf Apweiler ◽  
Angel Argiles ◽  
Joachim Beige ◽  
...  

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) became binding law in the European Union Member States in 2018, as a step toward harmonizing personal data protection legislation in the European Union. The Regulation governs almost all types of personal data processing, hence, also, those pertaining to biomedical research. The purpose of this article is to highlight the main practical issues related to data and biological sample sharing that biomedical researchers face regularly, and to specify how these are addressed in the context of GDPR, after consulting with ethics/legal experts. We identify areas in which clarifications of the GDPR are needed, particularly those related to consent requirements by study participants. Amendments should target the following: (1) restricting exceptions based on national laws and increasing harmonization, (2) confirming the concept of broad consent, and (3) defining a roadmap for secondary use of data. These changes will be achieved by acknowledged learned societies in the field taking the lead in preparing a document giving guidance for the optimal interpretation of the GDPR, which will be finalized following a period of commenting by a broad multistakeholder audience. In parallel, promoting engagement and education of the public in the relevant issues (such as different consent types or residual risk for re-identification), on both local/national and international levels, is considered critical for advancement. We hope that this article will open this broad discussion involving all major stakeholders, toward optimizing the GDPR and allowing a harmonized transnational research approach.


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