January 2017

Late last year, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (“NIST”) released  Special Publication 800-160 (the “Guidance”) on implementing security in Internet-of-Things (“IoT”) devices.  The Guidance was released following several highly-publicized distributed denial-of-service (“DDoS”) attacks in 2016 and is intended to provide a framework for software engineers to better address security issues and to develop more defensible and survivable systems in a sustainable manner throughout the life cycle of these devices.

On 10 January 2017, the European Commission published the official proposal of the revised e-Privacy Regulation, which amends the current e-Privacy Directive. Many of the alarming changes that were included in the leaked December draft of the Regulation, which we covered, have been changed, resulting in a practical set of rules that align with the wider EU data protection framework. Below, we highlight key points in the official proposal.

On January 10, 2017, the EU Commission published a package of documents on the EU’s data economy strategy, including e-privacy, data protection and the “European Data Economy.” The Commission documents,  published in the context of the Commission’s digital single market (“DSM”) initiative announced in May 2015, illustrate again the strong links between the EU’s digital regulatory strategy, data protection, intellectual property and antitrust policy, notably including the Commission’s preliminary report on its sector inquiry on e-commerce, also launched in May 2015.