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The European Union (EU) has a strong focus on the digital economy, and this week it released its draft proposals for an EU-wide Data Protection framework that if approved could see business face hefty fines – one million euro or 2% of takings – if guilty of misusing personal data.

For some it is a breakthrough, for others it creates an environment of fear.

We received comment this week from Hitachi Data systems’ CTO Francois Zimmermann who is in praise of the new EU efforts. “It will overhaul the rules regulating how companies store personal data. [This is] a step in the right direction,” Zimmermann said. “These measures will help to address the explosion of data we have seen in recent years and put basic measures in place to better protect our personal information.”

His concern, however, lies with the timeframe for which this will be implemented. He asks how the adoption of technologies such as cloud computing and virtualization will affect the longevity of the proposals, which will take two years to become law.

“Will they still be relevant?” Zimmermann asks. “Since the last raft of changes were made to the legislation in 1995, we have seen ever-increasing amounts of personal data routinely transferred in a manner beyond our control. In our hyper-connected world, we need to address this challenge with responsibility being shared by the individual and by corporates.”

Zimmermann said he believes the policy should be updated through an evolutionary process, and he is right. These things can easily open a can of worms, and we all know the pace at which technology, and how we sit with it, runs at the moment.

The EU is most likely thinking of some of its own needs in rushing through these proposals. It has a lot resting on digital projects at present, which must have have seen billions of dollars worth of investment so far.

Concerns about how the private data of constituents is protected, in a number of these projects, is what is holding them back.

Here is one example. I have been fortunate enough to sit in on stakeholder meetings with key representatives of one EU biobanking project – the Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure.

This project must be coming up to another round of funding – it was previously funded through Strategy 7  and Horizon 2020, which will cover funding to 2020, is just around the corner. Through this project, the EU hopes to link a number of medical resources together to help drive key medical research not only in its universities, but private companies.

To do this, it requires access to the medical records of patients in hospitals and surgeries across the EU.

Why, you may ask? Private companies have hit a wall in regards to research into some areas of medicine. Part of the problem is the patient data is just not there for them, but it does exist in hospitals. For universities, the situation is the same, but the problem is, they start at square one.

The EU project hopes to offer access to private data on studies already undertaken in return for some patient records, which names erased, in the hope that it could bring breakthroughs in areas such as cancer research, and more.  It is an interesting proposal, you can read more about it in FOCUS 18. It highlights just how important data can be, and why protection of it is vital.