How the Netherlands is taming Big Tech (via nytimes)
Lynn Haaland, chief privacy officer at Zoom, said the talks had helped the video communications company understand how to improve its products to meet European data protection standards and “be more transparent with our users.”
“We are so small that, initially, many cloud providers just look at us, raise an eyebrow and say: ‘So what? You’re the Netherlands. You don’t matter,’ ” said Nas, who helped lead the Dutch negotiations with Microsoft, Zoom and Google. Consumer software typically collects reams of usage and performance data from users’ devices and cloud services — diagnostic data that U.S. tech firms often freely employ for business purposes like developing new services. But under the EU law, diagnostic data tied to an identifiable user is considered personal information, just like the emails a person sends or the photos they post.
“It begins with culture and then making sure that cultural pivot shows up in our products and our software and most importantly, in the way we describe what we do to our customers,” Brill said.In 2021, the Dutch audit of Google’s tools for schools, now known as Google Workspace for Education, reported that the products lacked certain privacy controls, transparency and contractual limits around their use of personal data.
“We had to explain to Google that school boards have a duty of care, and they have to be in control of students’ personal data,” said Job Vos, a data protection officer for SIVON, a Dutch cooperative that negotiates contracts with tech vendors on behalf of Dutch schools, who participated in the yearslong talks with Google. “It cannot be used for commercial purposes.”
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