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.

Why do we need the reform of European Personal Data Protection Law? Panoptykon Foundation prepared a publication explaining problems regarding current law and presenting solutions to those problems that should be included in new regulation on personal data protection.

Why do we need the data protection reform? How to protect right to personal data in new digital age? Could new, more harmonized law lead to better and more up-to-date protection? Katarzyna Szymielewicz (Panoptykon Foundation), Kirsten Fiedler (European Digital Rights) and Jan Albrecht (member of the European Parliament) discuss main problematic issues in current data protection framework (based on data protection directive from 1995) and solutions proposed by civil society and European Commission for the new regulation.

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.