European Privacy Regulators over Uber breach, Pakistan needs the same over the issue of Careem. Security breaches are on the rise nowadays, despite of implementing strong security policies every tech giant have suffered this situation. No matter how effective your privacy regulations are; there is always need to do more in ever increasing cyber crimes.
In this regard, now, Europe’s national privacy regulators have joined forces to deal with Uber over the way it handled its massive data breach last year.
Well, apart from Germany, where each state has its own data protection authority, each EU country has its own national policy regarding protection and privacy. Seeing the Google (GOOGL, -0.03%) and Facebook (FB, -0.58%) breaching of European privacy law, the regulators discovered a few years ago that in order to get maximum results, there is need to coordinate their investigations.
So, recently the regulators decided to create a task force to handle with the Uber breach, in which the company found out the fact that hackers had stolen the data of 57 million users around the world.
Uber’s international headquarters are sited in Amsterdam, so the Dutch data protection authority will lead the plan. On the other hand, regulators from Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the U.K. will also join.
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However, they won’t have joint fining powers, but still it’s going to be a national issue.
Now, under the current EU data protection order, each country is allowed to set its own maximum fines for breaching the data protection policies. The maximum fine is £500,000 ($673,000) according the U.K.’s data protection act.
Even if fining powers will be significantly increase under a new regulation that will apply in May across the EU. Well, still fines are quite low, certainly from the outlook of a well-funded U.S. tech giant.
On the other hand, hiding a data breach isn’t clearly illegal under that legislation, but failing to appropriately protect the data is illegal, and the covering up the matter and hiding it from authorities may increase the fine.
It is important to mention here, concealing a breach is illegal in Netherlands and the maximum fine is €820,000 ($970,000).
Moreover, Italy was the only EU country which had announced a complete investigation into the Uber incident before this new regulation policy. It may charge fine more than $1 million, with the amount being related to the number of Italians who were affected.
In the past, we have seen such coordinated actions by the EU’s privacy regulators such as Google, over its combined privacy policy (an action that forced Google to give clearer information to users across the world). Furthermore, we have recently-formed taskforce that’s looking into Facebook’s promise-breaking incorporation of WhatsApp users’ data.
How Pakistan can implement these kinds of regulations?
Recently, we have witnessed the matter of Careem security breach which also affected Pakistan users. It has challenged the Pakistani cyber law forces that Pakistan also needs to implement strict policies and fines in order to protect the users’ data. Cyber wing of FBI also need to form regulations, fine policies and coordination over the security breach issues of tech giants.
