Year: 2018
Type: dissertation
Abstract: As the traditional Internet has developed into the The Internet of Things (‘IoT’), personal data protection law has also expanded from being a niche field of law, into a legal area that is applicable in almost all sectors, services, and technologies. Globalisation and the vast technological development, and elaborated collection of data, has raised questions about whether the current EU data protection legislation can cope with the new challenges that the modern technology poses. As a result, the EU Commission undertook to propose a new EU data protection legislation, to replace the Data Protection Directive (‘DPD’), and to better cope with modern data protection issues, the legislation which we now know as the General Data Protection Regulation (‘GDPR’), and which became applicable in 2018. This article-based doctoral dissertation sets out some of the key elements of the EU data protection reform package that has been processed for the past six years, and highlights some of the main changes in comparison to the situation governed by the outdated DPD. The main method is legal dogmatic with elements of both ‘legal-political’ and ‘problem-centred’ methods. The context of the research is the IoT and personal data challenges brought by it to data subjects, mainly by private stakeholders. As will be identified in this dissertation, the IoT poses challenges to personal data protection mainly because the amount of personal data that is collected has increased substantially, and because information is gathered from so many different, scattered sources. In addition, the form of automatic communication between smart devices makes it difficult to apply fundamental transparency and fairness principles. This dissertation investigates the complexity of the legal state in EU surrounding personal data protection in the context of the IoT. The articles forming the dissertation outline changes both in law, and the world at large, point out legal unclarities, and contribute to the academic discussion about the possible effects of the GDPR. In a nutshell, this study aims to answer the question: Is the GDPR fit to deal with new technologies such as the IoT?
Source: Työväentutkimus Vuosikirja
Author: Lindqvist, Jenna-Sofia
Language: English
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funders: Tekes, Business Finland
OpenAlex ID: W2908827023