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The European Commission is working out how to expedite decisions on data privacy investigations that are more time-sensitive, EU Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders said Monday.
Speaking at POLITICO’s AI Summit, Reynders said the data leak at Facebook, which exposed the personal information of more than half a billion accounts (including Reynders’ own) is an example of a case that is taking “maybe too long.”
“When we have such kind of problem, we first need to ask the Irish data protection authority to engage in a dialogue with Facebook to see what the possible remedies are, and if it’s not [working], to go further with actions. It’s maybe long, so we need to think about some kind of fast-track.”
Still, the commissioner pushed back against reforming the enforcement mechanism embedded in the EU’s privacy code, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which his predecessor, Luxembourg’s Viviane Reding, who helped write the rules, is calling for.
Instead, Reynders said: “We have to ask the member states to invest technical, financial and human resources in the authorities, and I have many discussions with the president of the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) for better coordination within the EDPB.”
The Belgian politician also said the EU could suspend its decision to allow the bloc’s data to move to the U.K. if Britain decided to change its data protection standards.
“It will be possible to suspend or stop the process, if there’s a divergence in the future,” Reynders said, following comments by a U.K. government minister last week that the country stood ready to risk its deal with Europe in exchange for a “greater prize.”
“We will be … very vigilant … we need to be ready to react if there is some change in the future.”
The commissioner also hoped for a quick resolution to data flows across the Atlantic after Privacy Shield, the EU-U.S. data sharing agreement, was annulled by the Court of Justice of the EU last year. “I hope we are talking months,” Reynders said, indicating that an update could be presented at an EU-U.S. summit on June 15.
Vincent Manancourt contributed reporting.
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