As of January 1, 2021, I will be a partner at La Gro Geelkerken Advocaten. Two years ago was my first working day at La Gro Geelkerken Advocaten, on the first day of the merger between La Gro Advocaten and Geelkerken Linskens Advocaten. I found and find it great to shape the new office together. As a partner I can make an even better contribution to maintaining and expanding our large government practice. Within the government practice, I specialize in privacy law issues.
My interest gradually grew because of the questions I received from governments in the area of processing personal data. These increased especially in the context of the decentralization of youth care, among other things. A lot was coming down on municipalities at the time. Part of that was the processing of a lot of privacy-sensitive data. Since the advent of the AVG, the number of questions from municipalities in the area of data processing has only increased.
Municipalities process a lot of personal data. I regularly notice in my practice that not everyone is sufficiently aware of the fact that personal data is being processed and what consequences this has. Data protection starts with awareness. I hope to contribute to increasing that awareness. To achieve that, for example, I regularly give courses on privacy to municipal employees.
That municipalities very regularly receive 'improper' requests for inspection from, for example, people who do not reside or did not reside within those municipalities, and whereby these municipalities sometimes only have personal data of these people because these data have been provided to the municipalities by these people themselves. It is (rightly, by the way) not easy to establish abuse of rights in requests for access, but it would already make a big difference if requests for access were exempted from the Penalty for Late Decisions Act. I expect that the flow of improper inspection requests would then decrease significantly, without prejudicing the ability to make inspection requests.
The book "You do have something to hide" by Maurits Martijn and Dimitri Tokmetzis. The authors of this book describe in a very accessible way about why you do have to be careful who you give access to your data. In this way they contribute to the awareness that I too have in mind.
In the section In Motion we keep you informed about personnel changes and promotions within the privacy domain. Would you like to join Anke van de Laar in our column In conversation with a mover, or do you know a colleague who would like to tell more about his/her move to or within the privacy domain? Pass it on at info@privacy-web.nl, we would love to let you have your say!
