This week, WTC San Diego teamed up with Elaine Harwell, senior counsel at Procopio, to host a roundtable on a topic that has generated much confusion, interest, and anxiety over the past year – data privacy.
In May 2018, the European Union’s first-of-its-kind data privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), went into effect. With limited case law to aid in its interpretation, companies and regulators alike have since scrambled to ensure compliance and avoid penalties such as the $57 million fine levied on Google by France’s top data privacy agency.
The GDPR also propelled data privacy laws in other parts of the world. Last June, Governor Brown signed the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) of 2018, cementing into state law many of the general tenets from Europe’s GDPR. These include the right to know what personal information is being collected and with whom it is being shared, as well as the right to have personal information deleted from company databases. GDPR and CCPA share the objectives of increasing transparency, broadening existing definitions of data processing, and encouraging business behavior that prioritizes data security. At least 24 states in the U.S. now have laws that address the data security practices of private sector entities. This is a new reality, and for companies of any size, developing and maintaining a data privacy framework needs to be a priority.
For updates on upcoming workshops and events, you can subscribe to WTC San Diego’s newsletters or follow us on Twitter. If you are a company looking to grow your exports and international presence, also check out WTC San Diego’s flagship export assistance program – MetroConnect