EU GDPR regime

EU GDPR regime

Data protection law in the EEA (the EU plus Iceland, Norway, and Liechtenstein) is intended to ensure information about living individuals (within the definition of ‘personal data’) is used fairly and responsibly.

To help ensure that, data protection laws impose a large number of obligations on those ‘processing’ personal data (and on controllers of such processing) and grant rights to those whose personal data is processed (the ‘data subjects’). In summary, ‘processing’ includes doing almost anything with personal data, including storing, sharing, deleting or using it.

This subtopic addresses EEA data protection law, the General Data Protection Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (EU GDPR) and its key features at a supranational level. The regime is referred to as ‘general’ since there are special regimes applicable to the processing of personal data in niche areas, such as law enforcement processing and processing by the intelligence services, that are unlikely to be relevant to most organisations. Individual EEA states may exercise a number of national derogations and other discretions to put in place various additional or alternative data protection laws and the various supervisory authorities in each state may

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