On Friday in the Central District of California, defendant home security company Ring filed a motion to compel individual arbitration for the plaintiffs in a case alleging that Ring is liable for the hacking of their Ring accounts and devices by bad actors and additionally for allegedly sharing their personal identifying information with third parties without consent.
Read moreThe Role of Arbitral Institutions in Cybersecurity and Data Protection in International Arbitration
Cybersecurity and data protection have been dominating conversations in the international arbitration community in recent years. From an analysis of how the stakeholders may be best equipped to address cybersecurity risks, to considerations on maintaining confidentiality in international commercial arbitration, as well as calls to address the impact of the General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) on virtual arbitration proceedings, much scrutiny has been afforded to these issues. Discussions on this topic have been further enhanced following the release of the IBA Cybersecurity Guidelines (the “IBA Guidelines”), the ICC-NYC Bar-CPR Protocol on Cybersecurity in International Arbitration, the latest being the 2020 Edition (the “Cybersecurity Protocol”), as well as the public consultation draft of the ICCA-IBA Roadmap to Data Protection in International Arbitration. The author opines that cybersecurity and data protection go hand in hand as both involve the receipt, usage, processing, transmission, and preservation of data in any given setting. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has further heightened the importance of these issues since more proceedings with high value and business-sensitive information are being conducted wholly online, are frequently held in different jurisdictions, and often involve unencrypted digital exchanges.
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