Welcome back to Emlex's podcast covering regulatory affairs. I'm James Panicki. It's great to be with you again this week.

Today we're going to examine how the privacy law sausage gets made from

two very different perspectives. We'll look at Brazil's historic new data protection legislation,

the general law for data protection. We'll discuss how it came to life and the steps still

required to ensure that the new rules are firing on all cylinders. We'll cross to Sao Paulo

in just a few minutes' time. But first up today, we'll review the EU's progress, or arguably

the lack of progress, on a proposed e-privacy law. In what appears to be a strange turn of events,

efforts to screen for images and messages of child abuse

may offer a way around the deadlock, or at the very least a means by which to keep negotiations

going. Matthew Newman is Mlex's chief correspondent covering privacy and data protection from

Brussels, and he joins me now.

Matthew, let's start from the most compelling problem here, online child abuse.

What is the European Commission doing about it?

Well, back in July, the Commission said it wanted to have a new proposal on making sure that the telecommunications companies

would have the ability to keep monitoring, keep scanning for child abuse.

And the reason why this is such an issue is because during the pandemic, people are at home

and there's just the, there's been a surge in images and text

for child abuse. And at the end of this year, it's really crunch time because of a legal

quirk, the online services like WhatsApp or Weber, they will no longer be able to voluntarily scan for these

messages. So they had to put out a new proposal and that's what they did a couple weeks ago.

Well, let's talk about that new proposal. What does it amount to, what does it contain?

So it is an exception. So there's these ongoing talks called e-privacy. And if you think about

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