The Impact of the Data Protection Law on German Media

This work focuses on the impacts of the data protection law on the media in Germany and particularly on the influence of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which came into force in 2018. GDPR has no analogues and has extraterritorial applicability. This study includes analyses of German and European data protection law as well as statistics of data protection violations which caused fines since GDPR came into force. As a result of the research, we developed and offered 18 recommendations for media which could help to adapt to data processes according to GDPR and to avoid incidents connected with an insufficient level of data protection on their websites and to legitimate the use of personal data. These recommendations are based on the standards of the Privacy by design concept and the analyses of the case study of the experience of German media in adaptation to GDPR. As a part of the study, we analysed the interfaces and texts of the privacy policy and detected critical issues that were also could be prevented by the recommendations.