Axel Polleres: The surprising responses you get to GDPR data requests – an initial assessment

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) promises to enable us to request data back from data controllers, enable data portability, and – eventually – integration of our personal information stored in different siloes. However, it’s not that easy. In this short talk I will report back from a small experiment, I started on 25th of May to issue such data requests [1]. The partially surprising responses highlight various issues and challenges that smalle and medium-sized enterprises are confronted with, when answering such requests. After the talk, we would like to invite the audience to brainstorm on how this situation could be improved, discuss about how such requests could be handled more efficiently and what would be the benefits and incentives for doing so. Disclaimer: This is work in progress; I would be happy to invite interested collaborators to summarise and publish these experiences, as I think they could be of interest to a wider audience!

1. https://doingthingswithdata.wordpress.com/2018/05/25/gdpr-day-time-to-request-your-data-automate-it/