'Assessing Data Privacy Laws after 50 Years of Global Enactment' - Graham Greenleaf: CIPIL Seminar

Professor Graham Greenleaf of UNSW, spoke on the topic of "Assessing Data Privacy Laws after 50 Years of Global Enactment" at a seminar on 17 October 2019. It is (almost) 50 years since the first recognisable data privacy law was enacted in Hesse, Germany. Now there are 136 countries with data privacy laws, in all regions of the world but one, and multiple international agreements. How do we make sense of, and assess, the first half-century of these global legal developments? Such a task requires that we ask (i) how do we determine what privacy principles these laws embody, to enable global comparisons?; (ii) how is the enforcement of such laws to be assessed?; (iii) how do we measure the effectiveness of data privacy laws in 2020 (rather than 1970)?; and even (iv) what are the objective functions of data privacy laws? This presentation will examine what is involved in asking and answering these questions. For more information see the CIPIL website at http://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk