GPDR can be considered in many aspects.

For small organizations, this will involve many new responsibilities. It will also affect honest and high standards - as there will be a need to document compliance with these standards, while it has been sufficient to comply with them so far.

Larger organizations are likely to feel less because they are more formalized and bureaucratic anyway.

There will be fear of penalties, which may limit some activities. While most probably agree that abuses and uncontrolled trade in personal data should be limited, the problem of borderline events, taken in good faith, will also appear, which, however, can also be interpreted as abuse and transgression.

Will this improve the protection of the right to privacy? It really depends on people and their awareness. The last affair with Facebook showed how easy private data can be used, but on the other hand people should be able to count on such a situation by sharing their data on the Internet. No regulation can replace reason and caution.

Will it affect learning and information flow? I do not think so much. If these regulations were in force many years ago, today we would probably know that the AIDS patient traveled a lot and was homosexual - because they influenced the way the disease spread and that it affected homosexuals in the first place, but we would not know the name this patient, which does not matter to understand the mechanism of disease spread.

I work in data recovery. This is a very sensitive area when it comes to confidentiality and data security. If someone entrusts me with his medium, he expects that the data I will recover will not be disclosed to anyone else or to a jealous wife or police - if I suspect that they may be evidence of a crime. On the other hand, if the client is, for example, the Police, it is not my role to protect someone's intimate secrets that concern legal but very personal matters.

Usually I do not analyze the contents of the media, unless I am explicitly asked for it, so I do not even know about many ethically doubtful situations. However, over the years I have seen something like this several times that I had serious doubts as to how to proceed. Always prevailed loyalty to the client. He is the owner of the data and he is responsible for their use.

Thanks Dr Paweł Kaczmarzyk for your contribution to this question. Many researchers are afraid to say what do they think about GDPR , when I think they should discuss this topic better.

Thanks again.

Best

Lucindo

This is a little tricky when it comes to cloud services cause you may realize many companies in Africa are storing data on Europe servers Azure and Amazon .Does this mean compliance is required here?