What’s the next What’s the next step to GDPR? The new Spanish Law on Personal Data Protection and Guarantee of Digital Rights, is already in process.

What’s the next What’s the next step to GDPR? The new Spanish Law on Personal Data Protection and Guarantee of Digital Rights, is already in process.

Five months after the entry into force of the General Regulation on Data Protection (GDPR), the Congress has published its report on the Draft of the new Law on the Protection of Personal Data and Guarantee of Digital Rights.

The GDPR is directly applicable in all Member States of the European Union since its entry into force, without the need for state laws that transpose it into domestic law. However, domestic law may draft specific rules or restrictions if it is necessary to make it consistent with other regulations as well as to facilitate understanding.

To this end, our Parliament intends to publish a new Law on Data Protection – not without a certain delay – in which we are clarified issues such as the possibility of basing the processing of contact details of employees, self-employed and liberal professionals on a legitimate interest. It also establishes that those over 14 years old will be able to give their consent for the processing of their data with parental authority – when in the Regulation the age was set at 16 years. Another example is the new obligation for sports federations to have a Data Protection Delegate to deal with the data of its federations if these include minors. Though, a medical professional practicing as an individual will not need to have such a figure even if they deal with particularly sensitive data, such as health data.

Also, the legislator takes the opportunity to regulate for the first time novel issues such as the digital rights of citizens. Among them, the right of the relatives of a deceased person to request access to their personal data – and even, in certain circumstances, request its rectification or suppression – the right to digital security and education or the recognition of the right to digital disconnection in the workplace, which is intended to ensure respect for rest periods, leave and holidays of workers, as well as their personal and family privacy.

Although, for the moment, it is only a project, little by little the criteria that will be used by Spain and the Spanish Data Protection Agency to apply the GDPR are being consolidated.

Marinel-lo @ Partners
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