Friday 27 April 2018

REGULATION: FTC lags international counterparts in staffing for privacy enforcement - FTCWatch

FTC lags international counterparts in staffing for privacy enforcement - FTCWatch: "Comparisons between the FTC’s privacy division and data protection regulators in the UK, Japan and other countries must consider that those regulators are stand-alone agencies. But the gap between the spending and staffing of those agencies compared to the FTC’s privacy staff is huge. That is particularly striking given that most of the world’s biggest Internet companies, such as Facebook, Google and Amazon, are based in the US.
 

The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office, for example, has a budget of $34 million (£24 million) and a workforce of 520. But the ICO expects its budget to grow to $54 million (£38 million) by 2019, with a headcount of 700 by 2020. The US has five times the population of the UK.
 

In Ireland, the Data Protection Commissioner has a budget of $14.5 million (€11.7 million), with an expected headcount of 140 by the end of 2018. Ireland has a population of just 4.5 million, but the Irish DPC will be the lead enforcement agency for the GDPR because Facebook, Google and many other multinational Internet companies base their European operations there.
 

And in Japan, the Personal Information Protection Commission has a budget of $32.2 million (3.5 billion yen), and a staff of 103.
 

Comparisons of the FTC’s privacy spending with other regulators, such as the FCC in the US and data protection authorities in other countries, show the FTC’s privacy resources are “so pathetic,” said Chris Hoofnagle, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, who published a book in 2016 on the history of the FTC.
 
“Put it this way — the United Kingdom’s ICO, tasked with protecting a much smaller population and on information rights issues only, has a staff of over 500,” Hoofnagle said." 'via Blog this'

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