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Reconceptualizing the Right to Be Forgotten to Enable Transatlantic Data Flow

Reconceptualizing the Right to Be Forgotten to Enable Transatlantic Data Flow

with Sanna Kulevska and Michael L. Rustad

Tuesday, March 22, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Harvard Law School Campus, Wasserstein Hall
Milstein East C 

Based on the authors’ recent Harvard Journal of Law and Technology article, Reconceptualizing the Right to be Forgotten to Enable Transatlantic Data Flow, Sanna Kulevska and Michael Rustad will lay out the legal dilemmas that flow from the European Union’s far-reaching right to be forgotten (RTBF). Google Spain v. AEPD (May 2014) and Article 17 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will go into effect in 2018, are already driving a significant legal, economic and cultural wedge between the U.S. and its  EU trading partners. In October 2015, the European Court of Justice (CJEU) struck down the U.S./EU Safe Harbor agreement that enabled data to be freely transferred from Europe to the United States and in February 2016, the EU/U.S. Privacy Shield was proposed as a replacement. Sanna and Michael will lead the discussion of the legal dilemmas that policymakers face in walking the tight rope between the Scylla of constraining the right of expression and the Charybdis of diminishing an individual’s right to control their personal data. The authors will use current case studies of takedown requests from Google to provide context for their discussion of how a Safe Harbor 2.0 might achieve the proper balance between expression and privacy.

About Sanna and Michael

Sanna Kulevska, J.D., LLM is a Swedish lawyer who works on Internet law issues at the Legal Department of Google's European Headquarters in Dublin.


Michael L. Rustad, Ph.D., J.D., LL.M is the Thomas F. Lambert Jr. Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Intellectual Property Law Program at Suffolk University Law School. He is the author of the Global Internet Law Hornbook (2d ed. 2015, Global Internet Law in a Nutshell (3d ed. 2015), Computer Contracts (2016 ed.) and Software Licensing (2016 edition).

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About the Privacy Series

In the fall of 2015, the Berkman Center decided to further surface and highlight our work ongoing work on privacy through the launch of a Berkman Privacy Series, a collection of talks, papers, and other activities, both current and past, that seek to explore and address the increasing concerns about Big Data, which have focused national and international attention on questions of online privacy. Not all of our privacy work is collected in this list, but our hope is that this limited selection, including the future events listed, will serve to increase awareness, foster discussion, and help explore alternative mechanisms for balancing user privacy with the potential benefits of Big Data.

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Past Event
Mar 22, 2016
Time
12:00 PM - 1:15 PM