Protecting Citizens’ Personal Data and Privacy: Joint Effort from GDPR EU Cluster Research Projects

Confidence in information and communication technology services and systems is crucial for the digital society which we live in, but this confidence is not possible without privacy-enhancing tools and technologies, nor without risks management frameworks that guarantee privacy, data protection, and secure digital identities. This paper provides information on ongoing and recent developments in this area in the European Union (EU) space. We start by providing an overview of EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and proceed by identifying challenges concerning GDPR implementation, either technical or organizational. For this, we consider the work currently being done by a set of EU projects on the H2020 DS-08-2017 topic, namely BPR4GDPR, DEFeND, SMOOTH, PDP4E, PAPAYA and PoSeID-on, which address and aim at providing specific, operational solutions for the identified challenges. We briefly present these solutions and discuss the ways in which the projects cooperate and complement each other. Finally, we identify guidelines for further research