Commerce Boosting Safe Harbor Staff, FTC Increasing Safe Harbor Outreach
The Department of Commerce will ramp up staffing in coming weeks to better administer the U.S.-EU safe-harbor agreement, including a website redesign with different sections tailored for European Union consumers and companies, said Ted Dean, deputy assistant secretary for services at Commerce’s International Trade Administration, which administers the safe harbor program. The FTC developed its own website to highlight its safe-harbor enforcement actions -- over half of which have occurred in 2014 -- said FTC Consumer Protection Bureau Director Jessica Rich. Both officials spoke at a Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue event Tuesday on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.
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Commerce, the FTC and the European Commission have been negotiating significant changes to the safe-harbor framework since November, when the EC issued 13 safe harbor recommendations to enhance transparency, curb government snooping, allow easier individual redress and create stronger enforcement (http://bit.ly/IorNGe) (CD Nov 29 p7). Officials from both sides of the Atlantic have said the groups mostly agree on 11 of the 13 recommendations, but are still in difficult discussions over “national security exceptions” (CD June 11 p14).
Separate from the negotiations, Commerce and the FTC have been looking at ways to internally strengthen the safe-harbor program, said Dean and Rich. “Privacy policies should be public; links [to safe harbor information] should work,” said Dean. “We just need resources.”
Commerce is making offers to people “this week and next” to build out its safe harbor team. “We recognize that when a company makes a false claim about being in the safe harbor, that’s a problem,” Dean said. “We're looking at ways that we can more aggressively tackle that problem as well."
Access to safe-harbor information abroad is critical, Dean said. While a Commerce website with sections targeting overseas consumers and companies is a good start, he said, Europeans are more likely to go to their own country’s data protection authority (DPA) first. With that in mind, Commerce is developing “baseline information that we think should be on a European DPA’s website,” said Dean. “One of the ways you surface substantive problems,” he said, “is to make sure the right people have the right information at the right time about safe harbor.”
The FTC also is increasing its safe harbor outreach and education, Rich said. “We've not gotten the kind of referral that we would like” from Europe, she said. To change that, “we're working hard on transparency,” Rich said, “so people know to come to us.” The FTC has created its new safe-harbor website to promote its safe-harbor enforcement actions (CD Jan 22 p9), Rich said. “We're going to add our cases to that and try to raise awareness.” In a recent speech, FTC Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen asked EU member states to help with safe-harbor referrals (CD June 12 p9).
Tuesday, the FTC released a report summarizing the commission’s privacy work over the past year (http://1.usa.gov/1iCqrrZ). “We're going to start doing this every year,” Rich said. It identified the FTC’s privacy priorities -- big data, connected devices and safeguarding sensitive consumer data -- all of which apply to safe harbor, Rich said. It also detailed the FTC’s safe-harbor enforcement actions this year.
Safe-harbor actions “are efficient cases to litigate or obtain a settlement,” Rich said. There are, however, more than 3,000 companies in the safe-harbor program, Rich said. “We can do a lot, but we can’t investigate every company all the time.”