We’ll launch new project soon: ¿Quién Defiende Tus Datos?

We are very excited to announce the upcoming launch of a project we are currently carrying out in partnership with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “¿Quién Defiende Tus Datos?” (Who Defends your data?) is a project about encouraging companies to defend the privacy rights of their clients and users and to enhance their policies on data protection. Internet Service Providers, online housing portals and phone companies are amongst the sectors analysed in the first edition of this research, although any other popular online service could potentially be included in upcoming editions.

The idea is to motivate private companies, whose services are being used massively by millions of people, to foster privacy enhancing policies and give them visibility through a comparative report. This report is the final outcome of our study and will reflect the huge impact that these policies end up having for the privacy rights and data protection of users, besides showing in a very straightforward manner which companies take steps to place themselves on the side of their clients and users when it comes to defending privacy.

This project has already been carried out by the EFF in 5 countries: Chile, Perú, Colombia, Brazil and the USA,  analysing mostly telecom companies, the Sharing Economy industry and social networks services. The results are very powerful, giving visibility to both bad and good practices, positive initiatives as well as policies that still need a stronger implementation to fully comply with the evaluation criteria marked by the study.

The goal is always to get a better performance of the companies year by year, in terms of privacy and transparency, and at the same time to introduce more companies of different Internet sectors to these reports. We are proud to announce that the EFF has now asked Eticas to carry out the Spanish version of this study, a challenge which we have taken up with all our enthusiasm and expertise.

We analyse and ask companies to let us know what information they put available online about the data of their users; how it is being stored and treated, with what purposes and for how long; if this data can be shared with third parties; what internal processes do Internet companies follow when a law enforcement agency requests access to communications and personal data of a user, or what kind of commitments do companies make with their clients when it comes to privacy, when such a law enforcement requests arrives;  which measures are these companies promoting in order to gain transparency. All their practices and commitments in that sense must be published online in order to count for this report.

Stay tuned as we are about to reveal this kind of information and a lot more in February 2018! Look out for our report!