EU and US Privacy Experts Meet to Develop Transatlantic Privacy ‘Bridges’

WASHINGTON — On December 14, 2014, the University of Amsterdam and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology issued a press release about two recent meetings of the EU-US Privacy Bridges Project in Washington, DC (held September 22-23, 2014) and Brussels (held December 9-10, 2014).

The Privacy Bridges Project is a group of approximately 20 privacy experts from the EU and US convened by Jacob Kohnstamm, Chairman of the Dutch Data Protection Authority and former Chairman of the Article 29 Working Party, to develop practical solutions for bridging the gap between EU and US privacy regimes and legal systems. Bojana Bellamy, president of the Centre for Information Policy Leadership at Hunton & Williams, and Fred H. Cate, senior policy Advisor of the Centre, are members of this group.

During these meetings, government officials, academics and representatives from the private sector and civil society provided input on the group’s work in developing a practical framework for bridging the different EU and US approaches to data privacy.

Over the next nine months, the group will outline a menu of privacy “bridges” in a consensus report that will be presented at the 2015 International Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners Conference on October 28-29, 2015, in Amsterdam. This conference will be dedicated to the Privacy Bridges topic.

The Privacy Bridges meetings are jointly organized by Daniel J. Weitzner of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Information Policy Project and Nico van Eijk of the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam.