GDPR PARTNER ADDRESSES INTERNATIONAL TECHNOLOGY SUMMIT

GDPR PARTNER ADDRESSES INTERNATIONAL TECHNOLOGY SUMMIT

Michael Murphy, Partner, Holmes O’Malley Sexton, spoke on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) at the Irish chapter of the World Legal Summit. Held at the Gaffney Room in the Distillery Building, Dublin on 1st August 2019, the Summit, organised by Brendan Guildea BL and Dr. David Cowan, was designed to bring disparate jurisdictions together in collaboration around building a better understanding of the evolving global technology regulation and governance. The categories addressed at the summit were:-

• Identity and Personal Governance;
• Autonomous Machines; and
• Cyber Security and Personal Data.

The Bar of Ireland brought the Summit to Ireland with local partners Holmes O’Malley Sexton and CalQRisk.

Michael outlined the rationale behind the introduction of GDPR in May 2018 and whether these objectives have been met since its enactment. He addressed some of the implementation challenges that companies have faced during this time. In particular, Michael considered whether GDPR could have the unintended consequence of stifling innovation and ultimately concluded that entrepreneurs and start-up companies needed to have a privacy focus as their guiding criteria at the outset in order to be GDPR compliant rather than this being a neglected after-thought.

The Summit was a resounding success with a wealth of speakers from the legal and technology arenas who applied their focus to such issues as ethics in the roll-out of Artificial Intelligence, the challenges encountered by Uber in the development of their self-drive cars and the manner in which social media had developed, largely without any substantive regulation and the difficulties that have manifested. As Ireland is home to some of the world’s largest technology companies, this was a critical conversation and one which Holmes O’Malley Sexton were delighted to contribute to.