On May 24, 2016, the European Data Protection Supervisor (“EDPS”) presented its 2015 Annual Report. It provides an overview of the EDPS’ activities developed in 2015 and highlights key priorities for 2016.
Of course, the EDPS focused on ensuring the adoption of a new and effective data protection framework. Moreover, a considerable attention is devoted to the high level of cooperation with the Article 29 Working Party to analyze the consequences of the Court of Justice of the European Union’s ruling in the Schrems case and to the subsequent issue of international data transfers.
Main objective of strategy for 2015 – 2019 is GDPR’s implementation, focused, inter alia, on controller’s accountability issue, which is central to the data protection reform.
With this in mind, EDPS emphasizes the increasing importance of data protection by design and by default. Providing guidance on the technical implementation of data protection will become an increasingly important task for all supervisory authorities, including the EDPS.
In this context, IPEN (Internet Privacy Engineering Network) will be required to play an important role in translating new data protection obligations into engineering requirements, supporting data protection by design. EDPS will support the network as it intensifies its efforts to produce tangible results.