MLex Market Insight

In April, MLex Chief Global Digital Risk Correspondent Mike Swift sat down with Benjamin Wiseman, the US Federal Trade Commission's Associate Director, Division of Privacy and Identity Protection, for a deep-dive discussion of pressing privacy issues for 2024—including child privacy and addictive algorithms, healthcare data, personal data autonomy and unfair use of AI.

As 5,000 lawyers, regulators, academics and technologists convened for the International Association of Privacy Professionals Global Privacy Summit 2024, a team of MLex journalists were in Washington DC to chronicle the most important yearly gathering of the world’s privacy community. Covering GPS panels on artificial intelligence, data transfers and an array of privacy issues, and interviewing key regulators on the sidelines of the conference, the MLex team gathered after the conference to share their insights on the event.

Polish Justice Minister Adam Bodnar talks about his country's steps to reverse eight years of policies by the previous government. Bodnar, a former human rights commissioner, wants to show European Union officials that Poland has turned the page from the Law and Justice Party. Restoring ties with the EU — and unblocking EU funds that were suspended over a rule-of-law dispute — are top priorities.

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen talks about the regulatory and legal fallout that followed her release of documents to the press that detailed internal studies about how Facebook’s algorithm worked. She’s now using her nonprofit Beyond the Screen to push for regulatory change as the company is fighting hundreds of lawsuits for allegedly harming its youngest users for big profits.

Even as it surpasses a database of 40 billion faces to train its algorithms, the founder and chief executive of Clearview AI told MLex in an exclusive interview that it isn't going back to doing business in Europe, the UK, Canada or Australia, where the controversial facial-recognition startup has faced regulatory opposition. In the US, however, Clearview has put many of its most thorny legal problems behind it, according to Hoan Ton-That.

Australian merger laws are facing a revamp, amid concerns that the voluntary-notification system was being gamed by global dealmakers. But while there’s broad agreement that the voluntary component of the existing regime needs to be scrapped, there are divisions about which model Australia should embrace. The antitrust regulator is campaigning for a formal but speedy model; lawyers are campaigning for a US-style model that would give their clients ready access to the Federal Court of Australia. MLex has covered all the twists and turns of the debate and spoken to key players in the process, including Chief Adviser to the Competition Taskforce Marcus Bezzi and Australian Competition & Consumer Commission Chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb.

Věra Jourová is a Czech politician and lawyer who has been European Commissioner for Values and Transparency since 2019. She previously served as the EU’s Justice Commissioner. More recently, she has added digital duties after the EU’s digital commissioner Margethe Vestager took a leave of absence. Jourová is now responsible for the enforcement of the Digital Services Act, the EU’s landmark content-moderation legislation. The tragic events unfolding in the Middle East and social-media platforms’ role in spreading disinformation has been the first test for the DSA. Jourová is also focused on the AI Act, which is another initiative that has caught global attention. In an extended conversation with MLex reporters Matthew Newman and Sam Clark, Jourová goes over how she handles meetings with some of the biggest leaders of Silicon Valley to ensure they follow the EU’s new rules.

Anu Talus, who succeeded Andrea Jelinek to become the second chair of the European Data Protection Board in May, hopes to build on Jelinek’s work as she focuses on making GDPR enforcement more coherent, efficient and harmonized across the bloc’s member states. In an extended conversation with MLex on the sidelines of the Global Privacy Assembly meetings this year, Talus discussed issues ranging from the EDPB’s highly unusual step of making permanent and EU-wide a temporary Norwegian ban on Meta Platforms targeting users with behavioral-based ads without their consent issued under the GDPR’s urgency procedure, to how she entered the data protection field years ago.

Approaching his second anniversary as the UK’s Information Commissioner, John Edwards believes the culture change he has led since taking the job at the start of 2022 has the regulator ready for an “agile” spectrum of responses to data protection problems.

Sitting down with MLex recently for an extended conversation at the Global Privacy Assembly meetings in Bermuda, Edwards discussed the need for data protection regulators to have a more assertive response to the privacy risks of generative artificial intelligence than they had to the rise of social media business models more than a decade ago. For companies that want to comply with UK data protection law, Edwards said the ICO now has an array of tools and guidance showing that “we’re there to walk with you and to help you” comply with the law.

Edwards believes the UK has a unique and important place on the world’s data protection stage — close to Europe in terms of its privacy law but influenced by the US and the Pacific Rim in terms of its interpretation. “We have potential to act as a bridge between different data protection traditions,” he said.

Halimah DeLaine Prado is Google’s top lawyer, leading what she describes as an in-house, multidisciplinary law firm within the tech giant. As Google marks its 25th birthday this fall, it has rarely, if ever, been under more legal pressure around the world, including multiple antitrust and privacy trials in the US that could force changes to the crown jewels of its business – search, the Google Play app store and its digital ads ecosystem. During an extended conversation with MLex, DeLaine Prado talked about her hopes that Google can avoid “a race to the bottom” on privacy by nudging the ad industry toward a more privacy-protective future.