Data Dilemmas - New EU Data Protection Proposals

Data protection law is about to undergo the most fundamental change in 15 years. The EU's Justice Commissioner, Viviane Reding, announced in January a proposal for reform of the EU data protection regime. If passed into law, the proposed changes would require businesses to make some significant changes to how they currently process and use personal data. The new rules will represent nothing less than a complete overhaul of the current data protection regime.

Assuming the proposed reforms are adopted, we estimate that many of the changes will not take effect until 2015 at the earliest. Thankfully, this gives businesses a reasonable period of time to explore how they can integrate the legal changes into their operations with minimum disruption. Of course, the far-reaching implications of the new rules mean that significant lobbying from interest groups is now likely to occur even though the measures were published after a long public consultation.