The General Data Protection Regulation as enhanced control over personal data : effective at ensuring adequate protection for data subjects?

Abstract

Over the years, technical advancements negatively impinged upon data subjects’ control over their personal data. The right to privacy and to data protection are two fundamental rights that aim to safeguard data subjects against any privacy intrusions and to enhance their control over their personal data in order to preserve a democratic society. Although some authors argue that data protection is a derivative of privacy, these two are not interchangeable as the former explicitly safeguards values which go beyond privacy’s scope. The GDPR is a further step towards ensuring a stronger legal framework by harmonising data protection across Member States. The scope of this dissertation is to determine whether, to what extent and how the GDPR enhances data subject control over how their personal data is processed. This research engages specifically with those elements of data protection that enhance data subjects’ control over their personal data, being the data subject consent and data subject rights. Each of these rights is analysed in order to determine whether these rights give a stronger impression of data subject control in principle than they do in practice. Also, other suited alternatives are proposed in order to enhance and ensure an effective data protection. Through this analysis, it is concluded that the GDPR requires further amendments being proposed in this dissertation to remedy undesired pitfalls in order to strengthen the GDPR’s effectiveness at ensuring adequate protection for data subjects. It is concluded that data subject rights give a stronger impression of data subject control in principle than they do in practice. Data subject control is fundamental for an effective protection of data subjects regarding their privacy-related interests, but it is not sufficient and requires to be supplemented by other regulatory strategies in this ever-complex information society.