The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation does
not take effect until May 25. But many a travel buyer and supplier, both inside
and outside the EU, was preoccupied in 2017 with assuring the significantly
strengthened data privacy rights it enshrines for customers, employees and all
other individuals.
Issues particularly pertinent to travel managers include
giving travelers who are EU citizens the potential to know who holds their
personal data and why and figuring out whether they need to obtain traveler
consent for the treatment of their data. Suppliers need to be more diligent in
their data protection and much prompter about reporting breaches; the scandal
in which Uber took 13 months to reveal a hack of 57 million customer records
was only the latest reminder. Under GDPR, companies can be fined up to 4 percent
of global turnover for violations, a threat concentrating the minds of those
who may have overlooked this issue in the past.
According to International Association of Privacy
Professionals European managing director Paul Jordan, the "godfather of
GDPR" is Jan Philipp Albrecht. The Green Party Member of European
Parliament, a German citizen who looks even younger than his tender 35 years,
shepherded the legislation through as vice chair for the parliament's Committee
on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs. "Albrecht was responsible
for getting GDPR past the post. He drove a lot of the argumentation," said
Jordan.
Albrecht, a law graduate, also has been a persistent critic
of Safe Harbor and its successor, Privacy Shield, frameworks that aim to transfer
personal data from the EU to align with Europe's stricter data protection
standards. The dominance of U.S.-based service providers makes this a deeply
important issue to global corporate travel, and one expected to resurface in
2018.
Meanwhile, preparations for GDPR continue. In line with one
of the regulation's obligations, larger travel companies rushed to appoint data
privacy officers in 2017, and a travel industry GDPR code of conduct is afoot.