An anti-TTIP protests in Madrid, June 2015. Demotix/Marcos del Mazo. All rights reserved.Data protection is among the most debated issues of recent years. The debate on data protection and the right to protect one’s personal data reached new heights when Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA is spying on millions of people. The news that German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone was illegally wiretapped intensified the debate in Europe.
Or so it seems. But data protection has been an EU issue for more than 20 years now. A directive concerning the protection of data dates back to November, 1995. Data protection has since been included in the charter of fundamental rights during the negotiations of the 2000 Nice Treaty – though it became legally binding only in 2009 with the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty.
But what does data protection mean?
Data protection links to a series of rights that everyone has regarding his or her personal data that is being collected. These rights include: the right to information about when your data is collected, the right to know the name of the controller of your data and what happens to it, the right to receive this information whether the data was obtained directly or indirectly, the right to ask if the data controller is processing personal data, the right to receive a copy of your data in an intelligible form and the right to ask for deletion, blocking or erasing of your data.
