Data Protection Day 2016 – 4 Trends For The Coming Year

Today's date marks Data Protection Day 2016 – a day aimed at raising awareness and promoting best practices for privacy and data protection. At the beginning of this month, we looked at some high level developments expected over the coming year: new EU laws; new EU case law; and a potential for a new transatlantic data transfer agreement. Along with these developments, there are many more items likely to be high on the data protection agenda for 2016:

1. A continuing emphasis on human rights

Judgments by the CJEU – the EU's most senior court – have continued to focus on human rights, particularly in cases relating to data protection issues. This was seen, for example, in perhaps the most ground-breaking data protection case since Google Spain, the Safe Harbor case of Schrems. This trend towards a human rights-style judgment, which was similarly evident in Google Spain, is likely to continue as a feature of CJEU judgments on data protection and privacy-related