On 26 April 2006 the Council of Europe decided to launch a Data Protection Day to be celebrated each year on 28th January, it marks the anniversary of the opening to signature of the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data (ETS No. 108), thus raising awareness on the need to respect and protect individual’s privacy and highlighting the role of Convention 108 for transborder data flows in the world.
Data Protection Day is now celebrated globally and is called Privacy Day outside Europe.
Governments, legislatures, national data protection agencies, and other organisations hold events on this day to increase public awareness of the rights to privacy and the protection of personal data.
Respect for one’s home, correspondence, and private life is guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights. This includes safeguarding the confidentiality of emails, phone conversations, and messages. Only when specifically permitted by law and done for a legitimate reason, such as public safety or national security, can governments infringe upon fundamental rights.
Convention 108 has been helping to advance data protection and privacy for over 40 years, not just in Europe but globally. Convention 108+, its updated version, tackles the growing issues of digitising the world to create a space for the free transmission of data while protecting human dignity. Because of this, Convention 108+ is a special and all-encompassing instrument for legal harmonisation and convergence that restores the human being as a subject rather than merely an object of algorithmic inference, control, and monitoring.
As controllers, erasers and recoverees of data, we take data privacy very seriously. You can be rest assured that your organisation’s data is in safe hands.