On April 30, 2020, the French data protection authority, the CNIL, published a guidance surrounding considerations behind what it calls “commercial prospecting,” meaning scraping publicly available website data to obtain individuals’ contact info for purposes of selling such data to third parties for direct marketing purposes. The guidance is significant in two respects. First, it speaks to the CNIL’s view of this activity in the context of the GDPR and privacy concerns. Second, beyond the context of direct marketing related privacy issues, the guidance lays out some guiding principles for companies that conduct screen scraping activities or hire outside vendors to collect and package such data.
French Data Protection Authority
One year of Data Protection Enforcement in France: what the CNIL’s Activity Report 2013 Reveals and what to expect in 2014
By Marianne Le Moullec on
According to the French Data Protection Authority’s (“CNIL”) recently issued activity report for 2013, the CNIL was especially busy in 2013. The main topics addressed by the CNIL in 2013 were the creation of a national consumer credit database, the right to be forgotten, the right to refuse cookies, the proposed EU Regulation, and, of course, the revelations concerning the U.S. Prism program and the surveillance of European citizens’ personal data by foreign entities. The report also presents the main issues that the CNIL will tackle in 2014. Such issues include privacy in relation to open data, as well as in relation to new health monitoring apps or quantified self apps. The CNIL will also deal with “digital death” and more specifically, on how to deal with the social network profiles of deceased persons.