Privacy Protection and Law

In the digital age of data, people’s way of living, their common habits and ways of thinking have undergone great changes. Digitalization has become necessary for all industries. This digitization has advantages over businesses and people themselves, although the sharing of such data, such as personal information, to the sources that can misuse them, it can be easily achieved.

How to protect data and privacy is one of the most current topics and problems today.

This article begins with an introduction to the importance of digitalization, its security issues and how the law has regulated these issues related to data protection, particularly in Kosovo.

Data security challenges

The origin of all problems related to data security is the internet. These data can be divided into 3 categories:

• Data coming from people who are in the process of using the internet, including videos, texts, etc.
• Data generated by machines, or by various computer devices in the form of multimedia, database, GPS, smart devices, etc.
• Data collected by objects, during the operation of various types of digital devices such as digital signals required by the camera.

Data security risks

Although most people agree that their data be made available on the internet, rarely they think that their data can be misused, so even at this point they encounter a lot of incompatibility. If data is not properly protected during the usage process, then user privacy and data security are threatened.

For example, sellers can compare whether parents are aware of how their children spend, and thus publish important advertising information about it. Another example is the content statute published by internet users, in which case the information that the person has about the policy, and how he spends money can be analyzed.

Currently, most companies believe that once the information is processed anonymously, the identifiers will remain hidden, and then the information will be lynched. However, the reality is that privacy protection can’t be achieved effectively only through anonymous protection. For example, a company can use some of the search history records anonymously within 3 months of human use. Although the identifying information found there has been carefully stored, the content of many records can be accurately known.

Kosovo has finally joined the club

With the rapid development of the internet, people are leaving a lot of traces on the Internet, every day. This enables criminals to gather information on the internet and engage in illegal activities. This has managed to cause problems in the social and economic life of people.
The good thing about all this is that states have begun to apply laws regarding the protection of the privacy of their citizens, with the exception of countries in Africa and Asia that do not have these regulations yet.

Kosovo, in 2019 has become part of the list of countries that have begun to take privacy and data protection seriously. Law no. 06 / L-082 in Kosovo on personal data protection, defines the rights, responsibilities, principles and punitive measures related to the protection of personal data and privacy of the individual. This law defines the responsibilities of the institution responsible for overseeing the legitimacy of data processing and access to public documents. It is worth mentioning that this law is in accordance with Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council, dated 27 April 2016, on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and the free circulation of these data.

This law applies to all official representations of the Republic of Kosovo

What can we do about it?

Besides implementing laws and rules, companies, and the country itself should take these recommendations in consideration:

1. The online media that have been created today have become important channels for interpersonal communication. In order to increase awareness of preventive security measures and to minimize the filling of important personal information, it is necessary to raise personal awareness to protect oneself and to monitor pitfalls as well.
2. Society has begun to pay more attention to their privacy, and governments themselves have begun to apply new data protection laws. This can be achieved by setting up an Agency for the Protection of Privacy. This is to better monitor the online behavior of people, but also for government laws to be applied more in different companies.
3. It is necessary for citizens to start adapting to the changes and increase their level of privacy protection. It is useless for a state to increase the security of privacy, without the awareness of its citizens for data protection. It is necessary to know that registering with personal data on the website, without confirming their credibility, can cause great damage to us. Unnecessary publication of personal information on social networks can have consequences, which if we do it with full awareness, can be retaliated against. It is therefore necessary to create awareness campaigns in schools, universities, companies, and various media.

Conclusion

Today it has become necessary to use technology, in which case, the entry of personal data is needed. Many times, this data is not known where and by whom it was used. Although, at first glance, the use of this data is not harmful individually, it can bring a lot of economic and social damage to society. It is therefore necessary to have mechanisms and institutions that think for the common good and manage to control the misuse of private data. A very good step that governments have started to take is the creation of laws and regulators, as a guide for various institutions and enterprises to apply rules to protect the privacy of employees and their customers.

Although the challenge remains, the publication of this data by the users themselves, is seen as a necessary tool to create awareness campaigns for data protection, in which case it is reasonable to create agencies to protect and monitor the publication of private data.