IATE Term of the Week: General Data Protection Regulation

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The dozens of emails received recently probably made you aware: on May 25th 2018 the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) takes effect. Here is our Term of the week’s definition: regulation adopted as part of the EU data protection reform package with the aim of allowing EU citizens to better control their personal data, and businesses to reduce red tape and to benefit from greater consumer trust. This new EU law regulates what companies can do with our email, full name, address or geolocation data. Actually, GDPR came into force on May 25th 2016, but, as from today, its application is mandatory for any company operating in the EU even if it is not European and/or is based outside this territory. Indeed, many companies will apply all changes introduced by the GDPR worldwide.

The GDPR’s purpose is to unify legislation in a field more and more important in the Internet era in order to protect users from the wrong use of their data. The law has not changed since 1995, but privacy has changed a lot in the last 23 years! Therefore, citizens can now request that companies such as Facebook, Google, Amazon and YouTube reveal which data they have about them and can ask for it to be removed.

“When someone enters your name in a search engine such as Google and results appear that include links to old newspaper articles that talk about a debt that you have already paid off, you can ask Google to delete them,” the European Commission remarks. Therefore, it seems to be a step towards Google’s battle regarding the right to be forgotten, as well as regarding non-authorized disclosure, identity theft, abuse and security, both online and in real life.

Here is a screenshot of the entry in IATE for GDPR:

 


Written by Víctor Mir – Robert Schuman Communications’ Trainee at TermCoord. Víctor, who hails from Spain, studied in a German School and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Translation and Interpreting, a University-specific degree in Linguistic Mediation and a Master’s degree in Edition, Production and New Journalistic Technologies

Sources:

  • EUROPEAN COMMISSION: 2018 reform of EU data protection rules. Available at bit.ly/2Fa05Kl (accessed on 25/05/2018)