Technology giants brace for Europe's new data privacy regulation

Some changes in the few months such as Google letting people worldwide choose what data they want to share with its various products, Amazon improving the data encryption on its cloud storage service and Facebook rolling out a new global data privacy centre Sunday are rippling out worldwide. 

A major reason for these shifts comes from Europe: The tech giants are preparing for a stringent new set of data privacy rules in the region, called the General Data Protection Regulation. Its set to take effect May 25. The tech giants are preparing for a stringent new set of data privacy rules in the region, called the General Data Protection Regulation.

The regulations restrict what types of personal data the tech companies can collect, store and use across the 28-member European Union. Among their provisions, the rules enshrine the so-called right to be forgotten into European law so people can ask companies to remove certain online data about them. 

With the deadline for the new rules now just a few months away, Silicon Valley’s tech behemoths have been scrambling to get ready. 

“Every person who works for us has, in some way, been involved in preparing the company for GDPR,” said Doug Kramer, general counsel of CloudFlare, an internet performance and security company based in San Francisco that has tightened its data storage and processing practices. “GDPR is going to introduce very fundamental changes to the way the internet works for everyone.”

The rush of activity is a reminder of how Europe has set the regulatory standard in reining in the immense power of tech giants, while other places — including the US — have largely taken a noninterventionist stance. The GDPR rules were approved in late 2015 after tech companies like Facebook ran into problems over data protection with national privacy watchdogs in various European countries.

European officials said the coming rules are forcing American tech giants to take a step back. “There has not been any pushback from American companies,” said Vera Jourová, the European Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality. “If anything, they seem very eager to understand how exactly they can comply with the regulation.” Officials from Facebook, Google and other companies said in interviews that they had been working to give people more control over what data they share anyway. 

In the past, many of the companies fought back in European courts over privacy rules and declined to offer certain products in the region rather than redesign them to meet privacy standards.

©2018 The New York Times News Service