On October 20, 2016, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) published Opinion 9/2016 on Personal Information Management Systems, PIMS. The opinion acknowledges that the recently adopted GDPR provides for increased transparency, powerful rights of access and data portability, giving individuals more control over their data.
However, the EDPS highlighted how market conditions and business practices can create obstacles for the effective exercise of data protection rights (Opinion 8/2016).
The Opinion briefly describes what PIMS are, what problems they are intended to solve, and how. It then analyses how they can contribute to a better data protection and what challenges they face. Finally, it identifies ways to build upon the opportunities they offer.
The inspiring principle should be for individuals to be able to store their personal data in secure, online storage systems and freely decide when and with whom to share it. if compliant with data protection law, PIMS offer a new technical architecture and organization for data management that would protect personal data.
The idea is to strengthen fundamental rights in the digital world, whilst creating new business opportunities for PIMS providers, which would act as intermediaries between the individual and the online services they use.
The full text of the opinion is available at https://secure.edps.europa.eu… Open PDF
The related press release is available at https://secure.edps.europa.eu…
Originally published on Technethics on December 6, 2016