WIREDGOV

As the European Data Protection Supervisor sent his recommendations to the EU co-legislators negotiating the final text of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), he launched a mobile app to compare the latest texts from the Commission, the Parliament and the Council more easily on tablets and smartphones.

Giovanni Buttarelli, EDPS, said: “Privacy and data protection matter more than ever to people. For the first time in a generation the EU has an opportunity to modernise, harmonise and simplify the rules on how personal information is handled. These rules must be relevant for the next generation of technologies. As part of my remit to be proactive and constructive, my recommendations aim to support the co-legislators to get a better deal for the individual, to make safeguards more effective in practice and enable them to benefit from technological innovation. The GPDR is not the reform of my dreams but I firmly support the institutions in the last mile to achieve the best possible outcome: improvements are still feasible."

The EDPS recommendations are necessarily phrased within the constraints of the negotiations involving the three main EU institutions (trilogue) and therefore strictly based on their texts. However, the EDPS has been innovative in encouraging pragmatic solutions that leverage on more than a decade of experience in supervision, policy advice and global partnership. The EDPS recommendations have been made public in the interests of transparency and accountability.

The proposed new rules will potentially affect all individuals in the EU, all organisations in the EU who process personal data and organisations outside the EU who process the personal data of individuals in the EU. As a result, the rest of the world is watching closely. The quality of the new EU law, its future oriented approach and how it interacts with global legal systems and trends is paramount. Europe can lead by example internationally.

The EDPS considers that the EU needs a new deal on data protection, a fresh chapter, focusing less on excessive formalities or prescriptive detail and investing more on dynamic safeguards to allow the individual to be in control of their data in the big data world we inhabit. Guidelines and best practices from reinforced and truly independent data protection authorities should help to deal with the rapid evolution of technology. 

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