Information on this website

We would like to welcome you to our website. We are pleased that you found your way to us. As you can probably see, we provide the wording of the EU General Data Protection Regulation in a clear, easy-to-understand way. And it is all free.

Please see sub-chapters "General information", "Binding character" and "Liability disclaimer/copyright".

General information

The new EU General Data Protection Regulation has been in effect since 24 May 2016 (there is a transitional period of two years). This regulation is very extensive and the content can be difficult to understand: there is no table of contents and no cross-references. In our view, the material is not conducive to productive work. In addition, the scope of the text has been increased from 37 pages (Federal Data Protection Act (BDSG)) to 88 pages (GDPR).

It is clear that Brussels and Berlin do not think it to be important that we in the data protection world can understand the regulation in a systematic way. Even companies we serve have precious little opportunity to "take a quick look" at the regulation. This is why Nicholas Vollmer of SecureDataService decided to present the regulation text in a more readable form. We consciously adopted the layout from www.gesetze-im-internet.de to ensure you feel at home when using it. We also made sure to keep the design simple and the format narrow to enable the website to be easily accessed on smartphones.

We have also added the following aspects to the basic text of the regulation to make it more convenient to work with:

• A table of contents
• Hyperlinks to the article numbers mentioned in the regulation (wherever this was feasible)
• References to the corresponding recitals
• References to explicit provisions concerning fines
• References to the BDSG where it contains similar provisions
• Notes on particular articles which are more relevant to supervisory authorities
• Reader-friendly design with blank lines and indentations
• Introduction of HTML jump labels for each numbered paragraph ("13.htm#8")

You will soon come to realise that the specially prepared text makes reading the regulation an almost enjoyable experience. It will also help you to be far more productive.

How authoritative is the regulation as shown here?

You may be asking yourself how much you can trust the texts presented here. It is a legitimate concern but we can reassure you:

We have downloaded the regulation texts from the official EU website. This ensures they match the publications in the European Official Journal.

We have added/modified the following content:

• We take the liberty of underlining certain words in specific cases if they are particularly important for understanding the text (these are often inconspicuous sub-clauses that are particularly significant, see Article 30 para. 5).
• The translations may be inaccurate. A good example is Article 28 para. 7, which states the obsolete article number "87" instead of "93". The reason for this is probably that numerous articles have been deleted since its creation which means the references no longer match. There were errors with item letters (a,b,c,...) in the Dutch version. We have clearly marked the corrections to these errors (red, bold, underlined).
• If a provision in the regulation represents an opening clause for national legislators (or is affected by one), we reference this in small grey lettering. Sometimes, this is difficult to determine, which is why we have generally limited ourselves to opening clauses which apply to the non-public sector; if we did not do this, there would be far too many references since the public sector features a great number of opening clauses.
• If a provision is subject to explicit fine regulations, we also provide notice of this.
• We reference the old and new Federal Data Protection Act in parallel.

Have you noticed any further errors in the regulation text? Have we missed out cross-references? If so, please feel free to contact us so we can provide a revised text. The date on which the text was exported from our database can be found at the bottom-left of every page.

Liability disclaimer / Copyright

Please be aware that we do not assume any liability for the accuracy or completeness of the texts and cross-references. If you find any errors, or would like key cross-references to be added, simply get in contact with us.

The copyright to the regulation text presented is held by Nicholas Vollmer of SecureDataService. You are not entitled to use the content provided here outside of the web browser; you are especially prohibited from publishing the texts on other websites. Please respect our work.

All that remains to say is: we hope your work with the regulation text will be productive. Let us hope that the high expectations for this regulation are met.