The General Data Protection Regulation came into force three years ago this weekHoliday snaps and cute puppy pictures on social media, banking, shopping and accessing health services — almost every aspect of life involves the collection and storage of data. Innovations such as the virtual assistant Alexa, smart fridges linked to the internet that know when the cheese has run out, and the Covid contact-tracing app mean that the public are giving away increasing amounts of personal information every day. SponsoredAdvancing technology, warns Rafi Azim-Khan, the head of data privacy at the London office of the American law firm Pillsbury, creates a risk of the “general public sleepwalking into a surveillance society”. To counter the problem, data protection laws began emerging in the 1970s. But it was the dotcom days of the late 1990s and then fears

Source: The Times May 26, 2021 22:52 UTC