Data protection for the digital age: comprehensive effects of the evolving law of accountability

The law of personal data protection has for years been lagging behind technology, which is evolving propulsively and with high speed. A number of new challenges arising from the post-modern digital age have been identified for rights and freedoms of individuals with respect to processing of their personal data and thus a need for adapting the relevant legal-regulatory regime and ensuring a workable and systematic data protection system for the third millennium. After examination of the current legal framework and supporting systems at the level of European Union law, this paper focuses on recently proposed reforms. Proposed new EU legal-regulatory regime towards a potent data protection ecosystem is strongly supported by stricter accountability of those who are responsible for personal data. As one of the core legal principles supporting the new regime, accountability denotes, in a nutshell, a number of legally enforceable duties to implement and verify measures and procedures that can ensure operative and demonstrable data protection compliance. Selected highlights of the proposed accountability measures are therefore examined in this paper and arguments provided for a shift towards organizational data protection management and governance already today.