Privacy & Data Protection
The primary role of the Privacy Focus Group is to coordinate and help drive the Coalition community’s practical responses to the privacy challenges emanating from the existing and emerging privacy, data protection, and data management regulations, with a view to enhancing capacity building capabilities for the members. Its scope is broader than the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and addresses all EU regulations impacting data and as such impacting the responsibility of privacy practitioners.
Objectives
Our members have a clear need for guidance, advice, and information about these EU regulations. The Privacy Focus Group fosters the identification and sharing of lessons learned and best practices and promotes collaboration among the participants to enable the effective, efficient, and consistent implementation of the data related regulations across the private sector, public authorities, and educational institutions.
The Privacy Focus Group also supports efforts to protect privacy rights beyond the member community by providing practical tools (e.g., “Data protection is also your job. Time for a clean-up! campaign”; Incident Handling Guide) geared towards small and medium-sized companies.
Topics
Practices
The Focus Group members gather in a plenary meeting once a quarter. Preference is given to in-person meetings to foster a more open discussion under the Traffic Light Protocol and Chatham House Rule.
Online webinars are held to convey specialist expertise to a broader audience. Generally, these webinars are recorded and can be consulted freely on the Coalition blog in the webcasts’ section.
There are currently no sub-groups established within this Focus Group.
Sometimes meetings are held together with other focus groups such as the Cloud Security Focus Group, to address topics related to data protection in the cloud.
Privacy Focus Group members have worked on the following projects:
- Guide on Data Protection
- Awareness campaign ‘Data protection is also your job. Time for a clean-up!’
- EDUBox Data & Privacy in partnership with VRT, Mediawijs, Belgian Data Protection Authority (GBA – APD), Imec, Kenniscentrum data en maatschappij (KDM), and DNS Belgium.
The chair also maintains relationships with other initiatives in the Belgian privacy ecosystem such as the Data Protection Institute, DPO Circle and DPO Pro, and where useful, joint events are being organized.
