A Study on the Lack of Enforcement of Data Protection Acts

Abstract

Data privacy is a fundamental human right, not only according to the EU perspective. Each EU state implements sophisticated data protection acts. Nevertheless, there are frequent media reports on data privacy violations. The scientific and the political community assumes that data protection acts suffer from a lack of enforcement. This paper is an interdisciplinary study that examines this hypothesis by means of empirical facts on juridical assessment criteria -and validates it. We have inspected 100 service providers, from social online platforms to web shops. Our study considers legal requirements of the privacy policy and how providers ask for consent and react to requests for information or deletion of personal data. Our study is based on articles of German law that have a counterpart in the EU Directive 95/46/EC. Thus, our study is relevant for all EU states and all countries with similar regulations.

Collaborative data privacy for the web

“…However, the regulatory approach often results in a daunting number of norms and laws that are hard for individuals to overlook and for the data collectors to manage. Thus, the regulatory approach suffers from a lack of enforcement [3]. Furthermore, new technologies often result in legal uncertainty, since no regulations exist at roll-out time.…”

“…Many legal privacy regulations exist, e.g., based on the OECD principles [8] or the EU directive 95/46/EC [6]. However, the complexity of the regulations and the sheer amount of transactions and data collectors result in a serious lack of enforcement [3]. This calls for privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) [16].…”