Now, as we are approaching the 5th anniversary of GDPR´s applicability, it is worth remembering another significant anniversary: on May 11, 1973, exactly 50 years ago, the Swedish Parliament adopted the Swedish Data Protection Act (Datalagen), which was the first national data protection legislation in the world.
Although the Swedish Data Protection Act was the first national data protection law in the world, in Germany, at the state level, in Hessen, a data protection law was adopted earlier, in 1970, which also - rightly, albeit in a slightly different category - applies for the title of the first data protection law. However, the Federal Data Protection Act (Bundesdatenschutzgesetz) was adopted only a few years later and entered into force in Germany on 1 January 1978.
The Swedish Data Protection Act did not cover all data processing operations, but focused on data processing carried out by using information systems, but its appearance indicated that the protection of personal data, and thus the persons behind them, deserve more attention, first primarily with regard to data processing by the states, and later, due to technological developments, also with regard to data processing by the private sector.
If we consider that the beginnings of more specific legal thinking about data protection and privacy can be traced back to the article "The Right to Privacy" published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890 by Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, it can be seen that it took several decades from the publication of this article until the adoption of the first national data protection laws, but since then, the events have accelerated significantly. The role of data protection in connection with the challenges posed by technological development has recently received special attention not only in Europe, but also in many parts of the world.
There is no way back, and 50 years after the adoption of the first national data protection legislation, data protection has increasingly become a global issue that crosses national borders. You can also bet that developments in the legal environment affecting data may follow each other with ever smaller intervals. Significant anniversaries, like this, may make us thinking whether the legal solutions developed on the basis of the needs of a few decades ago (regarding which, of course, there have been several changes in recent years and decades) have stood the test of time, and how much we need to put thinking about data protection on new foundations and try to respond to challenges in data protection along with new approaches.
