GDPR One Year Later

This year in May marked one year since the implementation of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. There had been a brief informal grace period, but that has expired and enforcement has begun. In this Today’s General Counsel article, Dentons attorneys Todd Daubert and Peter Stockburger discuss what can now be understood about this monumental shift in regulatory approach. Perhaps most important for companies based outside the EU is the new scope of extraterritoriality, and the risk of extremely stiff penalties for non-compliance. But the GDPR as done more than initiate a regulatory regime. It has changed the conversation about privacy, leading regulators worldwide “to consider whether their laws should follow the EU’s approach of treating privacy as a fundamental human right or the traditional approach in the United States of addressing market failures on an issue-by-issue basis, which has led to a patchwork of hundreds of issue-specific federal and state laws.”