News

The Federal Court of Justice today decided to limit the use of dashcam images as evidence in court to clarify traffic accidents. Bitkom President Achim Berg comments the decision: "Digital technologies make traffic safer and dashcams can make an important contribution. Dashcams create more legal certainty for all road users and contribute to a better reconstruction of an accident, for example."

The Conference of Independent Data Protection Authorities of the Federal and State Governments recently assessed the relationship between the new General Data Protection Regulation and the existing Telemedia Act (TMG). In the opinion of the data protection conference, the General Data Protection Regulation applicable from 25 May 2018 would completely replace the previous provisions of the Telemedia Act on web tracking.

Only three weeks left - then all companies must have implemented the requirements of the EU Data Protection Basic Regulation (DS-GMO). However, like many large and medium-sized companies, most startups are still a long way away, as a recent survey conducted by Bitkom Research on behalf of the Bitkom digital association shows among more than 300 startups.

New data protection regulations pose major challenges for companies this year. Many of them often lack sufficiently qualified personnel for implementation of the new rules. More than every second company (56 percent) in Germany has less than one full-time position planned for employees who mainly deal with data protection issues. This is the result of a representative company survey commissioned by the digital association Bitkom.

The U.S. Supreme Court is facing a landmark ruling: the U.S. government wants it to deeply intervene in European data protection. In February 2018, the court hears a case on whether a US authority may require companies to give them direct access to personal data stored outside the US. A decision is expected by summer 2018. "Direct access by US authorities to personal data from Europe is incompatible with European data protection law," says Bitkom CEO Dr. Bernhard Rohleder.