How do EU consumers see their privacy in the era of the GDPR?

With modern-age technology allowing tracking, collecting, analysing and storing large amount of data, online data privacy has become a key topic. Data breaches and cases demonstrating unethical use of data have led to increased privacy concerns. To address such concerns, legislation is evolving along with improving technology to protect consumers’ privacy. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been introduced in the EU to strengthen privacy of EU citizens. Being in force since May 2018, the regulation package aims to increase data security through enhancing transparency, improved control over one’s data, reinforcing trust towards companies and better protection against data breaches. This study explores EU consumers’ data privacy experience in these areas to see how the GDPR impacted data privacy experience during its first year. The findings of this study show that the GDPR had a positive impact on transparency, control, trust and overall data security but consumers haven’t noticed significant changes in terms of data privacy. While transparency, control and trust have improved, there are significant gaps to close in terms of digital literacy, awareness and real options for disclosing data. The biggest obstacles seem to be the vast amount of data, the effort privacy protection requires, inevitability to disclose data when using services and the lack of awareness of one’s existing personal data and privacy threats. The study also confirmed existing theory (Schermer et al., 2014) about privacy fatigue and the counterproductive effects of strict consent requirements. Consumers see the GDPR as an insurance for future privacy issues and the perceived usefulness of the new regulation depends on demonstrating that it’s able to hold companies accountable for unethical behaviour