The GDPR, an acronym for: General Data Protection Regulation, is a set of rules – a directive – adopted by the European Parliament and Commission, concerning the protection of "personal data" relating to people located within the territory of the European Union. The regulation, which applies directly to all EU member states, was adopted in 2016 and became enforceable in mid-2018.
The purpose of the GDPR
Its purpose is to give residents of the region maximum control over the details collected about them by various parties, and it tries to do so through an extremely long series of provisions. At the foundation of the European regulation and parallel regimes around the world lies the non-trivial assumption (and we are not being cynical about this) that "personal information" is exactly what it says – "personal" – and as such it belongs first and foremost to ourselves, the "data subjects".
Therefore, in order to use it, our full consent must be obtained. If we try to touch on some of the principles of the regulation in three or four sentences, we would say that in order to process "personal information" an "explicit consent" must be obtained, that the information collected must be minimal and match exactly the purposes for which it was given, that its processing must be carried out in a lawful, transparent and fair manner, that it must be kept confidential, properly secured, and retained only for the necessary length of time.
As a result, "data subjects" have various rights in this regard, such as the right to know exactly what information is stored about them, the right to be "forgotten" (i.e., to have the information fully deleted), the right to correct the information, to object to its processing, to object to its transfer to another party, and more. "Data controllers" must be able to prove that they comply with the provisions of the regulation.
The GDPR obligates "data controllers" and others even if they are actually located outside the territory of the European Union, when the "data subject", that is, the person whose personal data is collected, is a resident of the Union. For this reason the regulation is relevant to various entities, even when they themselves do not operate from Europe.
It is hard to assess to what extent the various regulations can save what remains of our "privacy" in an era in which almost every breath we take is monitored by someone or something (an era in which, it must be admitted, one of the main pastimes is precisely sharing "personal information").
As in many other fields, here too the feeling is that the various regulations are far from keeping up with the pace of technological development, and that the tangle of instructions is quite cumbersome and turns principles that should be clear and accessible into confusing, complicated and sometimes detached ones. In a world where the pace of development of systems and "engines" based on "artificial intelligence" and "big data" grows by the minute, it might be more efficient to focus on a smaller number of basic principles that can be defended and enforced, and to maintain flexibility suited to the changing reality. Even services that have long since become trivial and extremely common, such as the various cloud services, raise difficulties and questions when examining their compliance with the various regulations.
Anyway
Either way, the strict and rigorous GDPR has become a code with great influence on other regulatory and legal systems, and no discussion of privacy and data matters takes place without mentioning it.
Searching the internet for material about the Codex turns up endless sources and materials, apparently in every possible language. Surprisingly, we did not find a Hebrew translation of the regulation on the internet. Since its inception, in parallel with its commercial activity, uPress has tried to take part in social and community projects. Some of the products of those projects, for example in the areas of accessibility and security, are well-known brands that are used free of charge by tens of thousands of sites and serve hundreds of thousands of visitors.
We therefore decided to pick up the gauntlet and have the regulation translated into Hebrew (the codex itself, which consists of 99 chapters) and make it accessible to anyone interested, free of charge, so that every person can form an impression of the matters directly, for themselves.
This is a non-binding translation, reflecting a particular point of view, and presumably it is not free of mistakes and errors.
The only binding version is the official text, as can easily be found online on the official websites of the European Union and others.
We do not provide legal advice, neither in Israel nor in the European Union, and the aforementioned translation should in no way be regarded as a legal opinion or as anything close to one.
As mentioned, this is a gesture on our part to the Israeli public, whoever they may be, who wish to get a sense of the much-discussed regulation in their first language. We are working to bring the first part of the regulation, the preamble, to translation as well, which includes 173 sections containing descriptions of principles, explanations, illustrations and examples.
