European Commission can search private devices during raids

The European Commission recently revised its explanatory note on dawn raids to clarify that employees’ personal devices and media can be searched during raids. The revised note further explains that Commission officials may search the company’s IT environment as well as storage media, such as external hard disks, backup tapes and cloud services. Business executives should therefore be prepared to give up their personal smartphones for inspection if used for work purposes. In addition, IT personnel should be trained to assist the Commission officials with specific tasks, such as temporarily blocking individual email accounts, temporarily disconnecting running computers from the network, removing and re-installing hard drives, and providing administrator-access rights.