Let us introduce you to GDPR Today – your online hub for staying tuned to the (real) life of EU data protection law. Every two months we will be publishing statistics showing how the GDPR is being applied across Europe. More often we will be sharing relevant news – from legal guidelines and decisions to data breaches, new codes of conduct, important business developments, and memes.

Jan Nowak, previously a general manager at the DPA’s office and a long-term member of PiS, the ruling party, will become the new chair of the Polish Data Protection Authority. The nomination raised controversy as to whether Jan Nowak meets the legal requirements for this position.

Do we really need data protection in this world? Katarzyna Szymielewicz (Panoptykon Foundation) and Jérémie Zimmermann (La Quadrature du Net) talk about usage of data collected in Internet by private companies and changes that new data protection regulation could bring, including explicit consent for data processing as a rule, information about data processing presented in clear manner, regulation of profiling and privacy by default concept.

This paper is aims to give a brief overview of the following issues: (i) Polish data retention regime and its drawbacks; (ii) the use of data retention in practice and available
data on the subject; (iii) campaign run by the Panoptykon Foundation over last two years; and (iv) political shifts that occurred in Poland.

Videos from the Computers, Privacy & Data Protection 2017: The Age of the Intelligent Machines are already available (featuring Katarzyna Szymielewicz, the Panoptykon Foundation president).