With a large majority, the House of Representatives elected the lawyer Meike Kamp as the new state data protection officer. A lot of work awaits the specialist.
The long vacant position of the Berlin Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (BlnBDI) has been filled: the capital’s House of Representatives elected Meike Kamp as the new head of the supervisory authority on Thursday. The lawyer received 94 out of 123 votes and thus support from the opposition. She succeeds Maja Smoltczyk, who left office on October 27, 2021.
The red-green-red coalition needed – not only because of the new election of the House of Representatives last September – almost a year to fill the position again. At the suggestion of the Greens, an expert for e-privacy, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and freedom of the media and information has now won the race.
Berlin expects a lot
Kamp already knows the authority that she is now to lead well: she worked for the BlnBDI from 2010 to 2019, most recently as an economics officer. The 47-year-old had previously headed the data protection department in the non-public sector, including telemedia and telecommunications, at the independent state center for data protection in Schleswig-Holstein. Most recently, she worked for the state of Bremen as a representative in the legal and internal affairs committee of the Bundesrat.
The spokesman for data protection of the coalition factions, Jan Lehmann (SPD), Stefan Ziller from the Greens and Sebastian Schlüsselburg (Die Linke), congratulated Kamp on the election. “With the occupation, we are fulfilling an important domestic political concern of the red-green-red coalition agreement and closing the gap in a central department,” they emphasized. At the same time, the trio made it clear that in a city of media, start-ups and authorities like Berlin, “the expectations of the data protection officer are high”.
Smoltczyk vs. video conferencing services
The coalition is said to have previously expressed hope that Kamp would exercise her office less restrictively than Smoltczyk. The predecessor did not make herself particularly popular because of various arguments during the corona pandemic.
In a short test by the supervisory authority, widespread video conferencing systems such as Microsoft Teams, Skype, Zoom, Google Meet, GoToMeeting and Webex failed. Nevertheless, the Senate, the House of Representatives and Berlin’s universities continued to use solutions from the blacklist and ignored warnings from data protection officials. In addition, Smoltczyk had repeatedly complained about violations to the Berlin police.
Bring transparency law on the way
For Kamp, a crucial task in the area of ​​freedom of information is to accompany the work on a Berlin transparency law that also deserves the name. A first attempt at this failed in recent years due to the planned broad exceptions for entire administrative areas. In 2021, those affected had contacted the BlnBDI with a complaint or a request for advice in a total of 5671 cases, which was a record. There was another record for data breaches: private and public bodies reported a total of 1,163 incidents.
The authority issued 212 warnings, two warnings and one order last year. In addition, it imposed 61 fines totaling 133,350 euros. The highest fine imposed by Smoltczyk was 14.5 million euros. The decision was addressed to Deutsche Wohnen. However, the real estate company managed to avert the penalty in court due to serious procedural defects.
(axk)
