Wednesday, February 13, 2019
Room KOL-H-320
2 x 45 minutes
Anna Picco Schwendener & Bertil Cottier, USI
In 2018, the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force throughout the European Union. With its introduction, uncertainties emerged on how to correctly implement and apply this new regulation. With regard to academic practices (research and teaching), for the moment it is still unclear whether these regulations will apply to the Swiss reality and how single European states will interpret and implement the various dispositions, themselves.
In Switzerland, the Federal Act on Data Protection (FDPA) is currently under revision with the goal of adapting it to the new challenges of digitalisation in order to guarantee an adequate level of protection also in the future.
Especially for people doing research at a Swiss and European level this evolving scenario is a source of uncertainty. It is therefore important to determine which principles necessarily must be followed when processing personal data in Switzerland, which ones lead to an adaptation of current practices and which ones lay in a so-called grey zone and whose future development has to be closely followed at both national and international level.
The goal of this tutorial is thus to introduce the basic principles of data protection and show how the GDPR and the new FDPA might influence current academic practices in Switzerland.