It is clear now that the COVID-19 pandemic has completely changed the way we go about our daily lives. The expression “new normal” is a hark back to the global economic crisis. However, it seems to have “come to the fore” once again as the global pandemic forces us all to learn how to live in new, vastly different circumstances. 2020 – “Year of the Virus” The world has become a “global village” [1] where it takes just a few hours to travel thousands of kilometers, or for “a trip around the globe”. With humans the main transmitters of infectious […]
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Keeping in mind that the development of new and more detailed guidance for the processing of health data is part of the annual work plan of the European Data Protection Board (“EDPB“), for now, the EDPB has adopted Guidelines 03/2020 on the processing of data concerning health for the purpose of scientific research in the context of COVID-19 outbreak (“Guidelines“) on April 21, 2020 with the aim of safeguarding everyone’s right to the protection of personal data in the midst of a global coronavirus pandemic. Due to the pandemic, there are many scientific research efforts being conducted to fight against […]
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While governments and health authorities around the globe work together to find ways to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, they are keeping in mind the goal to protect lives and get society up and running normally. Governments and their public health authorities, as well as universities and NGOs, around the world, have been doing important work researching how to develop an opt-in contact-tracing technology. We are emphasizing the “opt-in” part for a reason: this means that no person will be traced nor will be driven to provide their own personal data or personal data of other persons, without their explicit […]
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An increasingly relevant issue in the COVID-19 pandemic era concerns the right to privacy and protection of personal data. A question often raised is – should personal information of individuals infected by the virus be made publicly available, or should it be swept under the rug? While some have argued in favor of publication, claiming it would allow citizens to better protect themselves, others have strongly been against it, arguing that it would lead to stigmatization and discrimination. And yet some countries, like Bosnia and Herzegovina (“BH”), seem to have taken the middle-ground approach, where the degree of protection of […]
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Gecić Law office has already written about how “COVID-19 couldn’t care less about GDPR”. The recent measures adopted in Montenegro once again confirmed what we have written before. On March 21, the National Coordination Body for Infectious Diseases of Montenegro adopted the Decision on the publication of names and addresses of individuals who were assigned measures of self-isolation, because due to the previous failure to respect the obligation of self-isolation by some of them. The Agency for Personal Data Protection and Free Access to Information of Montenegro approved the Decision, stating that it is not contrary to the Personal Data […]
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As a general state of emergency envelopes the world, and everything in it, one aspect worth looking at in light of the COVID-19 outbreak is the dynamic between a person’s medical information and their personal data protection rights. When declaring Covid-19 as a pandemic, World Health Organization (WHO) director general pleaded to all countries to “find, isolate, test and treat every case and trace every contact”. Indeed, every day in almost every country around the world, a significant number of people are sent for testing, quarantined, and questioned about who they have come into contact with, all with the aim […]
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