THE European Union is home to 512m people. From May 25th firms wishing to handle data that pertain to any of those people will have to comply with a new set of privacy rules called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The introduction of the GDPR is the biggest change to privacy legislation in the EU for 20 years. In particular, the new rules are strict about the purposes for which data may be used. If a bank collects names and addresses in order to process payments, or a hospital records laboratory-test results in order to treat patients, those organisations are prohibited from putting the data in question to any other use.
The GDPR does, though, come with an escape hatch—pseudonymisation. This means replacing identifying information such as names, dates of birth and addresses with data that look the same but do not reveal details about a real person. That is useful when the statistical content of a data set is required (say the proportion of women in a particular industry)...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology https://ift.tt/2GERaWR
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