Compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation: an exploratory case study on business systems’ adaptation

Sammanfattning: Current moves into a heavily digitalized era has led to a phase where our privacy is being eroded as we hand over our personal data to organizations and their systems. At the same time, the applicable laws to give security to the individuals have failed to incorporate these legal developments. However, in April 2016 the European Union proposed a change to a new regulation called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR will be implemented and start to apply in May 2018, thus the main purpose of this study was to investigate how organizations can adapt to changing regulations on how personal data should be stored and managed, and what the key tension points are within specifically closed IT-systems. The goal of the GDPR and this study on its feature implementation is to guarantee the EU citizens their right to privacy. Through an exploratory case study involving an in-depth analysis of two closed IT-systems this study develops a broader understanding on how organizations should adapt their daily businesses in order to be fully compliant with the new bylaws. This study identifies four critical issues which are used to discuss how the new bylaws could affect the EU citizens’ privacy. To accomplish this and open up for further investigation within the field of data privacy laws - four different propositions to modifications were suggested.