France is using social media to crack down on tax cheats. Budget minister Gérald Darmanin announced yesterday that from early 2019, tax administrators will be combing individuals’ public social media accounts for indications they may be committing tax fraud — for example by posting photos of luxury cars they “don’t have the means to own”. The move is part of a new law passed last month that gives French tax authorities more options to fight tax evasion.
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This will be a tricky one from privacy perspective, since Art.23 (1) GDPR does not offer a carte blanche for mass data scraping of social media “just in case we find evidence of tax evasion”. It’s the same chicken-egg timing dilemma in using Data Loss Prevention in workplace context: you need probable cause stemming from another source to actually commence such invasive actions. Another important point is that Tax Authorities are not obliged to be transparent on the data being processed, since such disclosure “is likely to render impossible or seriously impair the achievement of the objectives of that processing” according to Art 14 (5) b) https://lnkd.in/e3pdcTe