The Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés (CNIL, ; ) is an independent French administrative regulatory body whose mission is to ensure that data privacy law is applied to the collection, storage, and use of personal data. It is the national data protection authority for France. Its existence was established by the French loi n° 78-17 on Information Technology, Data Files and Civil Liberty of 6 January 1978. From September 2011 to February 2019, the CNIL was chaired by Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin. Its chair is Marie-Laure Denis.

History

The CNIL was created partially in response to public outrage against the SAFARI program, which was an attempt by the French government to create a centralized database allowing French citizens to be personally identified by different government services. On 21 March 1974, an article in the newspaper Le Monde, "SAFARI ou la chasse aux Français" (SAFARI; or, Hunting Frenchmen) brought public attention to the project. Interior Minister Jacques Chirac, freshly appointed following the events of May 1968, had to face the public uproar. Chirac was the successor to Raymond Marcellin, who had been forced to resign in the end of February 1974 after having attempted to place wiretaps in the offices of the weekly newspaper Le Canard enchaîné. The massive popular rejection of the government's activities in this domain prompted the creation of the CNIL.

At the beginning of 1980, when the CNIL began its main activities, news anchorman Patrick Poivre d'Arvor announced that the CNIL had registered 125,000 files. It is regularly criticised for its lack of administering proper sanctions to data privacy violations. It was criticized, for instance, for having authorized "ethnic statistics", forbidden in official demographic statistics.

The CNIL has been criticized for attempting to enforce right to be forgotten rulings on search results globally. In 2016, Google appealed a CNIL right to be forgotten ruling on the grounds that it could set a precedent for abuse by "less open and democratic" governments.

See also

  • French national identity card
  • General Data Protection Regulation
  • Regulatory Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication

Notes and references

  • Official website
  • La CNIL, detailed analysis of each of the CNIL's powers