The past bit more than one year has been in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic and a number of concepts that have previously been used only in scientific publications have become part of the public discussion. These include, among others, reproduction rate, flattening of the epidemic curve, and herd immunity. In addition to the emergence of some scientific concepts in our everyday conversations, another frequent side effect of the epidemic was the ongoing challenges to the practical applicability of data protection rules, making the data protection issues, which are often deemed as remote and theoretical, widely discussed and alive. On the one hand, these were issues that affected everyone, and on the other hand, they went into the depths of the private sphere, including the monitoring of people's movements, their contacts and their health. Depending on the different stages of the epidemic, there were various data protection "hot topics", ranging from contact tracing (including the use of applications for this purpose), analysis of movement/location data, applicability of various diagnostic tools (especially body temperature measurement and testing) to checking the immunity against COVID-19 (e.g. travel certificates).
Now, as we are celebrating the 3rd anniversary of the GDPR, we should consider, in light of the experiences of the past year, what is needed for a proper data protection immune system?