20 März 2021
Data Sharing and the Public Interest in a Digital Pandemic*
COVID-19 is our first digital pandemic. An effective response to COVID-19 is reliant on access to data that can be used to identify COVID-19 hotspots, guide national and localised responses, as well as be used in research aimed at developing COVID-19 diagnostics, therapies and vaccines. This digital pandemic has thus seen a shift in our data practices. “Open science” and the rapid data sharing of the results of clinical trials, observational studies, operational research, routine surveillance, information on the virus and its genetic sequences, as well as the monitoring of disease control programmes has been pushed to a new level. Continue reading >>
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15 April 2020
Data crossing borders
The cross-border sharing of personal data to combat coronavirus raises questions under the EU General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 (the GDPR) - two of which will be dealt with here. The first question is whether EU data protection law is flexible enough to allow the international sharing of personal data to fight the pandemic. Secondly, data protection law has traditionally been shaped by pivotal events in history (think of the effect that the reaction to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 had on data protection law), and one can ask what implications the crisis will have on the future development of data transfer regulation. Continue reading >>
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