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Giulia Romana Mele

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Giulia Romana Mele is an associate specializing in life sciences and data protection matters. She advises pharmaceutical, medtech and technology companies on a wide range of matters. Given her interdisciplinary background, she has particular expertise in matters that combine pharmaceutical and data protection angles, including R&D, clinical trials, medical devices and digital health technologies.

Giulia Romana also has experience in commercial transactions and in negotiating agreements for pharmaceutical and technology companies, including CRO, clinical trial, distribution and vendor agreements.

On technology issues, Giulia Romana further provides strategic advice to global companies on complying with EU, UK, and Italian data protection laws, with a focus on marketing and the AdTech environment.

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On 24 January 2023, the Italian Supervisory Authority (“Garante”) announced it fined three hospitals in the amount of 55,000 EUR each for their unlawful use an artificial intelligence (“AI”) system for risk stratification purposes, i.e., to systematically categorize patients based on their health status. The Garante also ordered the hospitals to erase all the…

On June 23, 2022 the Italian data protection authority (“Garante”) released a general statement (here) flagging the unlawfulness of data transfers to the U.S. resulting from the use of Google Analytics.  The Garante invites all Italian website operators, both public and private, to verify that the use of cookies and other tracking tools on their websites is compliant with data protection law, in particular with regards to the use of Google Analytics and similar services. 

The Garante’s statement follows an order (here) issued against an Italian website operator to stop data transfers to Google LLC in the U.S., and joins other European data protection authorities in their actions relating to the use of Google Analytics (see our previous blogs here and here).

Below we summarize the Garante’s key considerations.

  • Google Analytics’ “IP Anonymization” feature

The Garante analyzes Google Analytics’ so-called “IP-Anonymization” feature, which allows the transfer of user IP addresses to Google Analytics after masking the IP address’ last octet.  The Garante finds that such feature constitutes a pseudonymization of the IP address, and not anonymization.  According to the Garante, the feature does not prevent Google LLC from re-identifying the user, given Google’s capabilities to enrich such data through additional information it holds, especially in circumstances where those users maintain and use a Google account.…

Continue Reading Italian Garante bans use of Google Analytics