For global organizations as well as organizations in the EU, the GDPR has brought significant attention and resources to privacy. Finally, many executives are beginning to take privacy seriously. As I recently wrote in my article, Prime Time for Privacy, at Bloomberg Law:
The GDPR has taken privacy to the next level. Before the GDPR, nothing had fully gelled around what protecting privacy actually entailed. The consequences of poor privacy were also rather vague in many cases. There was no clear blueprint for protecting privacy. Organizations would do just one or two things, such as provide a notice of privacy practices and keep data secure, and then claim they were protecting privacy. But they were only doing a fraction of what was truly needed to protect privacy.
The GDPR has changed all that. It provides a blueprint for protecting data that is more thorough and complete than nearly any other privacy law. The GDPR contains provisions that require governance measures, data mapping, assessment, data protection by design, and vendor management, among other things. It provides for individual rights such as the right to access one’s data, the right to request restrictions on data use, the right to be forgotten, and the right to data portability. The GDPR has a broad definition of personal data, and it applies across different industries, so it provides a comprehensive baseline of privacy protection.
Now, privacy professionals can point to a definitive source of the various norms, best practices, standards, and rules that have long existed in fragmentary form. The GDPR has penalties that will keep the CEO awake at night. Privacy professionals can point to it and say, “This is what we need to do, and this is why.”
Unlike the law in the US, which is sectoral (each law focuses on specific economic sectors), the GDPR is omnibus – it sets a baseline of privacy protections for all personal data.
