A Significant Unknown in the New Data Protection law
The preliminary draft of the new Data Protection Act introduces the term “profiling” (Art. 3, lit. f, preliminary draft Data Protection Act). “Profiling” describes the evaluation of data in order to analyze or predict key personal characteristics. For data owners and processors this means that even formerly anonymous data can be augmented with additional external information, making it possible to draw conclusions about an individual. Even if the future data protection provisions exclude these connections, which can only be established with significant effort, the speed of technological progress means that they represent a significant unknown. Data processors may not (yet) be aware of the additional data and methods necessary for making a connection to an individual. However, simple machine learning methods can provide surprising results.
