On Monday 27 January, the day before Data Protection Day, Věra Jourová, the Vice-President of the European Commission, and Didier Reynders, the European Commissioner for Justice, stressed in a joint statement that in Europe “strong data protection rules are not a luxury, but a necessity”.
Twenty months after the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force, the European Commission welcomes the fact that, with the development of 5G and artificial intelligence, the Regulation has acted as a catalyst in placing data protection at the heart of a number of current and future policy debates.
The statement notes that European citizens are more aware of their rights than ever before and that businesses are increasingly using data protection as an argument with regard to their customers.
The Commission nevertheless believes that the priority is to foster the harmonised, consistent implementation of data protection rules throughout the EU. The declaration also stresses the need to provide national data protection authorities with the human, financial and technical resources they need.
The declaration states that the review of the GDPR Regulation (see EUROPE 12408/32), which the Commission will publish in the spring, will be an opportunity to assess how it has been applied and to clarify some of its features.
On the same day, the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) launched an online platform to contribute to the secure processing of personal data. (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)