On 4 January 2021, the European Data Protection Supervisor (“EDPS”) published a blog post by their Head of Technology and Privacy discussing COVID-19 related privacy engineering development and the issues raised in the context of tracing applications developed for monitoring virus spread.
The EDPS’s perspective on this topic focuses on the challenges for the development of science and practice of privacy engineering and also on the risks for individuals’ privacy rights. In addition, the blog post notes it is encouraging to see that developers are capable of paying attention to privacy risks and individuals’ rights.
The blog post also states that EDPS will continue to follow the development of privacy engineering and to work with data protection authorities, researchers, and developers in order to observe the progress in the data protection by default and by design field.
The EDPS blog post is available here.
