International Data Protection Day
It is international data protection day on January 28th! For Data Protection professionals it is an opportunity to raise awareness for our passion topic, but how did it start?
European Data Protection Day was initiated by the European Council in 2007, with the date being the anniversary of The Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data being opened for signature by the Council on 28 January 1981. A resolution was then passed in the US in 2009, to declare January 28th National Data Privacy Day and now, International Data Protection Day is observed in the US, Canada, Nigeria, Israel, the UK and 46 European countries.
It originally started as a business-oriented day, to raise awareness within organisations and their workforce, but the educational focus has shifted over the years to include all consumers, including family and household related data protection concerns.
If you have a vested interest in improving awareness of data protection in your business, you can use January 28th as being a trigger event to:
- Organise communications campaigns, including games or quizzes about topics such as data subject rights and data breach reporting.
- Encourage data handlers around your business to complete an annual purge of files, emails and other data that have reach your corporate retention rules.
- Launch an information security e-learning package or phishing training campaign.
Even if your organisation is not doing anything special for the event, just take a moment to refresh your memory on your organisation’s data protection policy and privacy notices, to keep them front of mind for another year.