Who owns my personal data?

A question which is still creating something of a storm in some circles. Mainly in those that make money from the intricately complex interpretations of law text which is further complicated by neighbouring laws, such as Intellectual Property (IP).

Most legal guys, and even worse my esteemed colleagues who started their careers in other domains such as cyber, just love to do this. Make it difficult and the more complex and intricate the better; and will even go as far as to condemn those who dare to state that my personal data belongs to me.

Well condemn me as you like, because this is the message I give to my customers! And why? Because to do anything different would forge dependancy instead of fostering empowerment.

Karen Lawrence Öqvist, Founder/CEO Privacy

Clearly from a deep legal technical standpoint I cannot have claim to own my personal data. But this is irrelevant to 99.99% of the worlds population who (1) do not have a law degree, or (2) are not working in the domain of GDPR, or in the slightest bit interested to do so.

If I was to start with a dive into the intricacies of IP law, there will be a zero comprehension of an individual’s rights pertaining to GDPR and their personal data. If this is where I, as a professional were to start… my customer who maybe installs alarms for a living, will be thinking but “….who cares except for the music industry?”

For my customers, I have only 20-30 minutes of training for each employee, to get the message across. And the message needs to be formulated in a way so that the business achieves the desired result, i.e. compliance as far as is practicable with GDPR Rules. And yes, I even use the terminology GDPR Rules, because my customers understand what a rule is!

For the GDPR Administrator the training is 3 hours. This is not long enough to dive into 250 pages of GDPR legal text and even IP law. It is long enough to ensure that he/she can do her job, and understands data subject rights and that these rights are not absolute. Some GDPR Admins I train even get excited about the subject matter. And only then can one take the next step.

I sometimes am concerned that I may simplify things too far, to a level whereby my skills are redundant, but in short this approach: costs less for my customers; and, they know exactly what they are getting for every € they spend which are building blocks for trust.

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