The rapid development of information technology has exacerbated the need for robust personal data protection, the right to which is safeguarded by both European Union (EU) and Council of Europe (CoE) instruments. Safeguarding this important right entails new and significant challenges as technological advances expand the frontiers of areas such as surveillance, communication interception and data storage. This handbook is designed to familiarise legal practitioners not specialised in data protection with this emerging area of the law. It provides an overview of the EU’s and the CoE’s applicable legal frameworks. It also explains key case law, summarising major rulings of both the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights. In addition, it presents hypothetical scenarios that serve as practical illustrations of the diverse issues encountered in this ever-evolving field.

Practically every organisation in the world processes personal data. European data protection law imposes a series of requirements designed to protect individuals against the risks that result from the processing of their data. It also distinguishes among different types of actors involved in the processing and sets out different obligations for each type of actor. The most important distinction in this regard is the distinction between 'controllers' and 'processors'. This book seeks to determine whether EU data protection law should continue to maintain its current distinction.

GDPR: Personal Data Protection in the European Union Mariusz Krzysztofek Personal data protection has become one of the central issues in any understanding of the current world system. In this connection, the European Union (EU) has created the most sophisticated regime currently in force with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU) 2016/679. Following the GDPR’s recent reform – the most extensive since the first EU laws in this area were adopted and implemented into the legal orders of the Member States – this book offers a comprehensive discussion of all principles of personal data processing, obligations of data controllers, and rights of data subjects, providing a thorough, up-to-date account of the legal and practical aspects of personal data protection in the EU. Coverage includes the recent Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) judgment on data transfers and new or updated data protection authorities’ guidelines in the EU Member States. Among the broad spectrum of aspects of the subject covered are the following: – right to privacy judgments of the CJEU and the European Court of Human Rights; – scope of the GDPR and its key definitions, key principles of personal data processing; – legal bases for the processing of personal data; – direct and digital marketing, cookies, and online behavioural advertising; – processing of personal data of employees; – sensitive data and criminal records; – information obligation & privacy notices; – data subjects rights; – data controller, joint controllers, and processors; – data protection by design and by default, data security measures, risk-based approach, records of personal data processing activities, notification of a personal data breach to the supervisory authority and communication to the data subject, data protection impact assessment, codes of conduct and certification; – Data Protection Officer; – transfers of personal data to non-EU/EEA countries; and – privacy in the Internet and surveillance age. Because the global scale and evolution of information technologies have changed the data processing environment and brought new challenges, and because many non-EU jurisdictions have adopted equivalent regimes or largely analogous regulations, the book will be of great usefulness worldwide. Multinational corporations and their customers and contractors will benefit enormously from consulting and using this book, especially in conducting case law, guidelines and best practices formulated by European data protection authorities. For lawyers and academics researching or advising clients on this area, this book provides an indispensable source of practical guidance and information for many years to come.

In this book, the protection of personal data is compared for eight EU member states,namely France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Romania, Italy, Sweden andthe Netherlands. The comparison of the countries is focused on government policiesfor the protection of personal data, the applicable laws and regulations, implementationof those laws and regulations, and supervision and enforcement. Although the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) harmonizes the protectionof personal data across the EU as of May 2018, its open norms in combination withcultural differences between countries result in differences in the practical implementation,interpretation and enforcement of personal data protection. With its focus on data protection law in practice, this book provides indepth insightsinto how different countries deal with data protection issues. The knowledge and bestpractices from these countries provide highly relevant material for legal professionals,data protection officers, policymakers, data protection authorities and academicsacross Europe. Bart Custers is Associate Professor and Director of Research at the Center for Law andDigital Technologies of the Leiden Law School at Leiden University, the Netherlands.Alan M. Sears, Francien Dechesne, Ilina Georgieva and Tommaso Tani are all affiliated tothat same organization, of which Professor Simone van der Hof is the General Director.

Nearly two decades after the EU first enacted data protection rules, key questions about the nature and scope of this EU policy, and the harms it seeks to prevent, remain unanswered. The inclusion of a Right to Data Protection in the EU Charter has increased the salience of these questions, which must be addressed in order to ensure the legitimacy, effectiveness and development of this Charter right and the EU data protection regime more generally. The Foundations of EU Data Protection Law is a timely and important work which sheds new light on this neglected area of law, challenging the widespread assumption that data protection is merely a subset of the right to privacy. By positioning EU data protection law within a comprehensive conceptual framework, it argues that data protection has evolved from a regulatory instrument into a fundamental right in the EU legal order and that this right grants individuals more control over more forms of data than the right to privacy. It suggests that this dimension of the right to data protection should be explicitly recognised, while identifying the practical and conceptual limits of individual control over personal data. At a time when EU data protection law is sitting firmly in the international spotlight, this book offers academics, policy-makers, and practitioners a coherent vision for the future of this key policy and fundamental right in the EU legal order, and how best to realise it.

This book provides expert advice on the practical implementation of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and systematically analyses its various provisions. Examples, tables, a checklist etc. showcase the practical consequences of the new legislation. The handbook examines the GDPR’s scope of application, the organizational and material requirements for data protection, the rights of data subjects, the role of the Supervisory Authorities, enforcement and fines under the GDPR, and national particularities. In addition, it supplies a brief outlook on the legal consequences for seminal data processing areas, such as Cloud Computing, Big Data and the Internet of Things.Adopted in 2016, the General Data Protection Regulation will come into force in May 2018. It provides for numerous new and intensified data protection obligations, as well as a significant increase in fines (up to 20 million euros). As a result, not only companies located within the European Union will have to change their approach to data security; due to the GDPR’s broad, transnational scope of application, it will affect numerous companies worldwide.

This book explores the coming into being in European Union (EU) law of the fundamental right to personal data protection. Approaching legal evolution through the lens of law as text, it unearths the steps that led to the emergence of this new right. It throws light on the right’s significance, and reveals the intricacies of its relationship with privacy. The right to personal data protection is now officially recognised as an EU fundamental right. As such, it is expected to play a critical role in the future European personal data protection legal landscape, seemingly displacing the right to privacy. This volume is based on the premise that an accurate understanding of the right’s emergence is crucial to ensure its correct interpretation and development. Key questions addressed include: How did the new right surface in EU law? How could the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights claim to render ‘more visible’ an invisible right? And how did EU law allow for the creation of a new right while ensuring consistency with existing legal instruments and case law? The book first investigates the roots of personal data protection, studying the redefinition of privacy in the United States in the 1960s, as well as pioneering developments in European countries and in international organisations. It then analyses the EU’s involvement since the 1970s up to the introduction of legislative proposals in 2012. It grants particular attention to changes triggered in law by language and, specifically, by the coexistence of languages and legal systems that determine meaning in EU law. Embracing simultaneously EU law’s multilingualism and the challenging notion of the untranslatability of words, this work opens up an inspiring way of understanding legal change. This book will appeal to legal scholars, policy makers, legal practitioners, privacy and personal data protection activists, and philosophers of law, as well as, more generally, anyone interested in how law works.