Gaëtan Goldberg and Ioannis Kouvakas
This talk will discuss noyb's first complaints on "forced consent" and the GDPR cross-border cooperation and consistency mechanism.
On the first day of the GDPR, noyb (the European Center for Digital Rights) filed four complaints on behalf of different data subjects across the EU before the data protection authorities in Austria, Germany, Belgium and France. The complaints, targeted against Facebook, Google, Instagram and WhatsApp, focused on the issue of “forced consent”, namely the invalidity of consent that users of these services were forced to give in order to continue using the service. Besides their substantive law implications, the complaints were also among the first ones to initiate the GDPR cross-border cooperation mechanism.
Drawing on this experience, the speakers (Data Protection Lawyers at noyb) will present an overview of the strategy followed in the forced consent case and share some preliminary findings from the first GDPR cross-border complaint process. Finally, the speakers will critically discuss the GDPR dispute resolution mechanism, wondering whether it could eventually be even better than expected.