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.