Giovanni Buttarelli’s speechOn 3 February 2015, Concurrences and Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP welcomed 145 delegates for a half-day seminar in the offices of Cadwalader in Brussels.
In March 2014, the European Data Protection Supervisor published a preliminary opinion entitled “Privacy and Competitiveness in the Age of Big Data : The interplay between data protection, competition law and consumer protection in the Digital Economy”. On 2 June, the EDPS followed up with a workshop in Brussels. Regulators and experts at that event were mostly from the privacy circuit. Hence, the Cadwalader and Concurrences seminar Antitrust, Privacy & Big Data was designed to begin to focus competition regulators and antitrust practitioners as well as technology and economics experts on some of the challenges Big Data presents in an antitrust context.
The programme was organised as three panels with high-level speakers. After a keynote address by the European Data Protection Supervisor, Giovanni Buttarelli, the first session began by focusing on the issue of Competition & Privacy. Speakers Alec Burnside (Cadwalader), Maurits Dolmans (Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP), Pamela Jones Harbour (Herbalife International) and Cecilio Madero (DG Competition) discussed the potential interplay between the areas of competition and privacy protection.