The European General Data Protection Regulation: An instrument for the globalization of privacy standards

摘要

The recent revelations about Cambridge Analytica and the breach that allowed the harvesting of the personal information of some 87 million Facebook users (at latest count) has pushed privacy protection to the front pages, and focussed attention on "surveillance capitalism" (Zuboff, 2017) and on the capture of personal data as the central resource for the "platform economy". As Facebook reels from the scandal, and rushes to rebuild consumer confidence, it has also pledged to apply the standards contained in the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to its global operations, if not all of them and if not immediately (Constine, 2018). At no time in the past 40 years, has the protection of privacy been so prominently, globally and intensively debated. How did it get to this point?