Data Protection Regulation

Robin Wilton of the Internet Society gave a talk at the TERENA Networking Conference on the interaction between privacy, regulation, and innovation. It's a commonly heard claim that regulation stifles innovation; yet the evidence of premium rate phone fraud and other more or less criminal activities suggests that regulation can, in fact, stimulate innovation, though not always of the type we want.

I was asked recently how I saw current legal developments in Europe affecting the work of incident response teams, so here’s a summary of my thoughts.

Last year the Article 29 Working Party published an Opinion on Cloud Computing expressing concern at the information available to those considering moving services to the cloud about the protection that cloud services offered for their data.

An interesting, though depressing, figure from Verizon’s 2012 Data Breach Investigations Report is that 92% of information security breaches were discovered and reported by a third party. Not by the organisation that suffered the breach, nor by its customers who are likely to be the victims of any loss of personal data, but by someone else.