Dear all,

Following up on our call today, I want to share the description for the CPDP2020 panel. I prepared it together with Rosa from the Smooth project. As said, we (meaning Star II) were kindly asked by the organisers to work with the Smooth project, given that there’s a lot of overlap between the two.

Title: The GDPR is easy: (Un)tangling SMEs compliance hurdles

SMEs are the backbone of European economy: they employ 2 out of 3 employees and produce 57 cents of every euro of value added. Some Data Protection Authorities (DPAs) suggest that attaining compliance with the GDPR for SMEs is fairly easy. Complying with the GDPR, however, poses distinctive challenges for SMEs – apart from lack of awareness, they rarely can afford professional legal advice. Therefore, SMEs have distinct GDPR related needs and merit special support from public authorities – DPAs. In view of this, the panel will first identify those distinct needs of SMEs and then it will turn to the discussion on ways in which public and private actors could help SMEs to move from a relatively good level of awareness to actual compliance with the GDPR.

Bullet points:

• What are the perceived distinct GDPR related needs of SMEs?
• What kind of assistance could SMEs expect and demand from DPAs?
• What traditional and alternative (e.g. AI) solutions facilitating GDPR compliance for SMEs are available on the market?
• What’s the perspective of an SME owner?

Chair: Lou Juget, ESBA (F) or Nadia Feci , KUL-CiTiP, BE (F) – Smooth project

Moderator: John Durcan, Enterprise Ireland, IR (M) - not related to any project

Speaker 1: Pietro Francesco Di Lotto, Confartigianato di Vicenza, IT (M) – Smooth project advisory board

Speaker 2: DPA – Júlia Sziklay, NAIH, HR (F) – STARII coordinator

Speaker 3: Ángel Cuevas UC3M(M) / Francesco Bonchi EUT (M)/ Narseo Vallina IMDEA (M) Smooth project

Speaker 4: Jasmina Trajkovski (F) – member of STARII advisory board (not paid)

Please note, this is a provisional line up and it still has to be approved by the CPDP organisers.

Additionally, in this link I enclosed some articles that I came across and that you may want to review before our next call on 6 September. Let me know if you can’t access it.

Best regards,

Lina Jasmontaite

Doctoral researcher

Law, Science, Technology and Society (LSTS)

Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB)

Brussels Privacy Hub (BPH)

Room 4B306, Pleinlaan 2, 1050

Brussels, Belgium

https://lsts.research.vub.be | www.brusselsprivacyhub.org