Data Protection for Individuals

  Your personal data

The right to protection of your personal data is a fundamental human right enshrined under Article 8 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.  

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as nationally implemented by the Data Protection Act, lays down the rules relating to the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and rules relating to the free movement of personal data.  

We live a data-driven economy and therefore the protection your personal data is indeed necessary.  Your data belongs to you and it is important that is is only used in ways that you would reasonably expect.  The principal scope of the GDPR is to give more control to individuals over the processing of their personal data.  

Personal data is any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person. An identifiable natural person is one who can be directly or indirectly related to that data, which means there are many possible identifiers as identification number, location data and online identifier (e.g., name, phone number, photograph, email address, or even IP address as a uniquely identifiable to a specific terminal and user)When one needs to determine whether a natural person is identifiable, account should be taken of all the means reasonably likely to be used, such as singling out, either by the controller or by another person to identify the natural person directly or indirectly.  

What does the term processing include?

Processing is any operation which is performed on personal data or on sets of personal data, whether or not by automated means. Article 4(2) GDPR covers the wide array of actions which are considered to constitute processing, namely “collection, recording, organisation, structuring, storage, adaptation or alteration, retrieval, consultation, use, disclosure by transmission, dissemination or otherwise making available, alignment or combination, restriction, erasure or destruction”.