Face to face with key players

In the coming weeks, the Privacy Council has consultations scheduled with the Belgian DPA (the Privacy Commission) to discuss its strategic plan and our cooperation, and with Microsoft, to discuss common privacy issues. The Privacy Council will also facilitate a meeting between certain B2C companies and Facebook.

As always, valuable information from these consultations will be shared with the entire community of Beltug members, so that everyone can benefit from these discussions.

Privacy and GDPR

The Council continues to work on ways to help Beltug support members in the area of privacy and GDPR.

These include a set of basic guidelines for setting up awareness training for different types of employees, based on real company experiences. This will be published in March.

We are also preparing a questionnaire for cloud providers, in the context of the implementation of the NIS directive.

Clearing the air about cookies

The Privacy Council recently took on the topic of best practices and difficulties with cookies. It’s a topic that touches everyone (to a greater or lesser extent), and several members will meet again to continue the discussions.

The first discussion revealed that:

• Different countries have different guidelines: EU – UK – B – NL.
• There are no statistics on user acceptance rates for cookies.
• The cookie regime is not very effective. A lot of people click to be able to continue. But it is very visible and gets a lot of attention.
• Regarding platform cookies (e.g. Salesforce, etc), the cookies need to be assessed during the evaluation. They are part of the risk, but companies want to choose the functionalities of a software in the first place.
• Google collects too much information with Google Analytics cookies! The Dutch DPA has created an interesting document on this: ‘Handleiding privacyvriendelijk instellen van Google Analytics’.