The European "General Data Protection Regulation" and the consumer's utility. Impact and consequences

Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject Law - Data protection, grade: 2,0, University of Hohenheim, language: English, abstract: This paper aims to conduct a critical literature review on the main research question: Does the European General Data Protection Regulation increase consumer's utility by increasing privacy protection? The paper is structured as follows in chapter 2.1, a systematic framework of the notion of privacy and privacy protection will be described. Afterwards, the paper will study which kind of personal data is collected, data collection technologies such as user log-in information, cookies or IP address, and the usage process of personal data. Then, in chapter 2.3, the command and control policy is considered a consumer policy instrument to determine how the consumer can benefit from the command and control policy and how the government can set limitations about the level of privacy protection and consumer's welfare. The last chapter 2.4 presents the significant articles of the law European General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR) for privacy protection and the consequences for non-compliance with the EU GDPR. In the main part, the research tries to answer the following questions split in chapters 3.1 and 3.2: How can we reduce privacy concerns? Can a privacy protection law like the EU GDPR lower privacy concerns and protect the welfare of the consumer? This paper sets out the main arguments for introducing consumers’ privacy concerns, privacy paradox, and consumer's utility regarding consumer welfare to answer the questions as mentioned above. Finally, the paper will summarise the findings and a concluding solution to the research question. Edward Snowden's disclosures regarding the surveillance practices of the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica affair, in which data from up to 87 million Facebook users were illegally collected. These both cases were the largest personal data scandal in the past years. The violations of privacy protection create enormous concerns, not only for the affected firms but also for their customers. Depending on the firm, the stolen data can range from relatively harmless information to extremely personal data. Besides that, a breach of privacy rights will cost a lot of money to remediate and do serious harm to a firm's credibility and reputation. These examples have sent alarming signals to governments, firms, consumer policy, and consumers to address the problem of personal processing data and privacy protection.