Data privacy is important for all businesses operating in Qatar and globally. Interest in data privacy continues to grow at a rapid rate as data protection is about ensuring people can trust organizations to use their data fairly and responsibly said an expert during an event.
The Qatar Financial Centre (QFC) Tech Talk webinar entitled, ‘QFC Data Protection – Current and Future Regula-tions’ provided insights into best practices and opportunity for firms to familiarise themselves with the data protection requirements and how to implement them.
Daniel Patterson, Com-missioner, Data Protection Office, QFC said, “Data protection is a lot when it comes to how the end-user expects his data to be treated and we have seen lot of cases with Google, Facebook when it comes to violating data protection.”
Entities need to know how to approach handling personal data as meeting data privacy compliance requirements is a complex undertaking for organisa-tions to achieve.
“Whether you do business in Qatar or want to expand it outside you need to pay attention to data protection and QFC is trying to give you a platform that makes you ready for it,” he added. Patterson explained the current and future data protection regulations within the QFC. “There has been a huge explosion in technology in the last 50 years. The processing power and data storage has increased capacity and become affordable, so this has changed techniques in terms of data analytics. Today we have big data, artificial intelligence, algorithms, machine learning, data mining, neural networks that map and model the human brain and how it functions,” he added.
He further said that this explosion in technology and new techniques has brought new companies into being, about 4.5 billion people on the planet now have access to the Internet on daily basis that is 64 percent as of December last year.
Facebook has 2.9 billion active users on their platform every month, so the amount of personal data that these firms are collecting is growing exponentially every month, so regulation has to be there to control it.
Elaborating on how regulations are set up he noted that it is a principle-based regulation which dictates how to process personal data that is fairly, lawfully and securely; to keep the data not longer than necessary; and there is also an accountability principle that is to be compliant with the regulations.
He said, “The data protection regulations in the QFC include consent, data subject rights, transparent communication, and data transfers which is a huge part of data privacy”. The Qatar Financial Centre (QFC) Tech Talk Series is designed to enable Fintech firms, experts and innovators from across Qatar’s technology ecosystem to share innova-tions, networks and discover opportunities across all ver-ticals of fields
