First, you need to get an overview of what personal data are being transferred, and what the legal basis for the transfer is.
If you are transferring to a country not approved by the EU Commission, you must move to step 3, which is to "assess whether the legal basis for transfer will be effective," meaning whether the personal data will be processed in a manner that provides a level of protection similar to that under GDPR.
This is where you conduct a "third-country assessment" or a Transfer Impact Assessment (TIA), which forms the basis for whether you should implement "additional measures" to protect the personal data you transfer from breaches in the destination country.
Many struggle with what exactly to evaluate.
After some consideration, we have used the EDPB's guidance on "European Essential Guarantees." Here's the guideline. This guideline outlines the European legal standard for laws and regulations.
Within the EU/EEA, we have a legal tradition that respects interference with human rights only under certain conditions. Privacy is such a human right.
The guide specifies that in a third-country assessment, you must look at the laws of the country to which you are transferring personal data. Then, you must assess whether the privacy intrusions that the country allows would be accepted within the EU/EEA.
Yes, it's THAT assessment of laws and regulations in a "third country" that constitutes a TIA or third-country assessment.
Four Basic Guarantees
What are the guarantees that our laws must meet for privacy intrusions to be within GDPR?
- The law that intrudes on privacy must be clear and precise and available to the public.
- The intrusion on privacy must be necessary and proportional, and the intrusion must achieve a legitimate purpose.
- There must be independent oversight and control to ensure that the privacy intrusions (e.g., surveillance) do not go too far.
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The subject must be able to test their privacy rights before a court or a complaints body. This is called effective remedies in legal terms!
And then it's our task to find the regulations that intrude on privacy, and assess whether they live up to these four guarantees.
And it's quite a job!
Join us on LinkedIn Live on Friday, June 14, from 12:00 to 13:00, and we will talk about how we went about this and our experiences with evaluating Taiwan as a third country. Find the event here.
These are general assessments â meaning you can share them with your neighbor!
But before we conclude: what we do in a third-country assessment is to evaluate the laws and regulations in the third country. And this means that a third-country assessment for one type of processing will be the same for another type of processing in the same country.
This means that once you, as a municipality and school owner, have conducted such an assessment, you can share it with others.
A TIA is not like a risk assessment, where sharing it exposes you to others exploiting your vulnerabilities. A TIA, as we conduct it, is a legal assessment of whether the laws in a country outside the EU/EEA align with the four basic guarantees that laws must meet within the EU/EEA.
The idea is that if the laws respect these four guarantees, then intrusions into privacy will be legitimate, and you as the registered will have the same protection as under GDPR. Then you, as the data controller, will also be able to transfer personal data to the third country without having to implement additional measures to secure the personal data.
The point is that you as a municipality and school owner should share your third-country assessment with your neighbor! Because your assessments will be really similar, sharing them opens you up to no risk, and there's no point in duplicating efforts.
It's also perfectly fine to "phone a friend" or more in neighboring municipalities to collaborate on such an assessment. This is a great example of how sharing benefits everyone!
Win-win-win!
I wish you a wonderful, privacy-friendly week-end!
Best regards,
Ida Thorsrud
Project manager national DPIA
This newsletter was translated from Norwegian to English with assistance from ChatGPT by OpenAI. While it guided our translation, we made independent editorial choices. Any discrepancies result from this combined approach.