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How will the term “Personal Data” be defined within the GDPR?
How will the term “Personal Data” be defined within the GDPR?
by Kefron
in Blog
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Sweeping changes to data protection in the European Union will come into enforcement in 2018 – May 25th to be precise – when the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is fully implemented across Europe. These changes will affect businesses in the UK in many ways, even with the status of Brexit negotiations still outstanding.

The GDPR is strongly focused on the rights of the data subject, i.e. individuals living in Europe, and their personal data. But ‘personal data’ is such a generic term. What exactly does it encompass, and how will that change when the GDPR comes into effect?

The current definitions of personal data
Under the current EU Directive on Data Protection, and the existing UK Data Protection Act, personal data is broadly defined as:

Any information relating to a living, identified or identifiable natural person.

This could be directly (e.g. a person’s name) or indirectly (e.g. the owner of that business). The definition of personal data applies to any piece of information which can used to identify an individual, based on ‘all means reasonably likely to be used’.

So for example, a user ID number is classed as personal data, because it can be matched to the name of a user on a database. The term ‘personal data’ still applies to data even if it requires the use of information elsewhere to identify an individual.

Under the current Data Protection Directive, personal data includes:

Identifiable information such as numbers