Turkey Is Catching Up On The General Data Protection Regulation

The Law No. 6698 on the Protection of Personal Data (Turkish Data Protection Law – TDPL), introduced to legal landscape on April 2016, was the first legislative piece covering the data protection wholly in Turkey. However, at the time, the EU Directive 95/46/EC was in force, and the TDPL was based on this aged legal text, with a little consideration of EU's upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The gap between the TDPL and the GDPR created this uneven playing field, where the conditions for processing personal data are not corresponding evenly one another, and the procedures are varying significantly.

However, the GDPR naturally made its mark on the TDPL throughout the practice in many forms, either by secondary legislation or by authority decisions. Turkish Data Protection Authority (TDPA), the regulatory body responsible of enforcement of the TDPL, was also keeping its eye on GDPR while reading between the lines of the TDPL. This tendency is now