“Data protection in EU: Comparative Study of National Reports” is aimed to produce a panoramic vision of the legal and ethical framework both at the national and EU level, complementing PANELFIT Guidelines.
Certainly, the GDPR significantly increases the harmonisation of European data protection regulation. Besides that, with more than 30 areas where the Member States have a “margin of manoeuvre” in their domestic laws, there will continue to be significant variation in both substantive and procedural data protection laws among the EU’s Member States. PANELFIT project has moved towards the objective of including essential information on the specifics of national regulation in the context of ICT data protection ELI.
The analysis has been prepared on the basis of the national reports provided by the PANELFIT network of correspondents, composed by carefully selected experts on the challenges faced by the project. Experts were provided with a questionnaire on the most relevant aspects of data protection in the context of ICT. The topics on which the specialists were queried were divided into five main blocks:
- Informed consent including relevant questions on domestic regulatory framework; rights of data subjects and data processing; minors, sensitive data and other additional categories of data; deceased individuals and personal data; accountability and Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA).
- Commercialization of data in relation with regulatory framework; practice; and nature of data.
- Security and cybersecurity, including: general regulatory framework; implementation of EU Law; personal data breach notification; supervision of cybersecurity.
- Enforcement: fines and sanctions
- Governance
National experts provide valuable information on the countrywide peculiarities, complementing PANELFIT Guidelines; which, therefore, offer a panoramic vision of the legal and ethical framework both at the national and EU level. The present study includes a comparative analysis of data protection in the 27 countries of the European Union. Offering stakeholders and end users a synthetic and simplified version. The national reports produced by our network of experts, so far, are reproduced as well.