Privacy - A value to defend " Contisystems

January 28th marks the 15th edition of Data Protection Day. This day aims to raise awareness in civil society about the rights related to the protection of personal data and privacy.

Data Protection Day marks the day on which Convention 108 - the first international legal instrument on the protection of personal data - was signed on January 28, 1981.

The importance of data privacy

We are all aware that data is becoming extremely important to the economy and to our daily lives, existing in increasing abundance and with potential uses that many of us probably can't even imagine. While this reality offers incredible opportunities, robust rules need to be put in place to deal with potential risks for individuals, companies and democracies in general.

At Contisystems, the reality and concern of dealing with personal data has been around for many years and this has always been reflected in the technical and organizational security measures that have been created and adapted to the risk of each situation.

The emergence of the GDPR

In 1998, Law 67/98 - the Personal Data Protection Act - was published, which already referred to similar obligations to the GDPR.

Although the GDPR came into force in May 2016, its legal application only began two years later, in May 2018, allowing companies time to prepare. And it was only in 2019 that the first law on personal data protection (Law 67/98) was repealed, via Law 58/2019, of 09/08/2019, which transposes the GDPR into national law.

The major change in terms of data protection imposed by the GDPR was the counter-regulatory regime, with regard to the amount of fines, which can be huge. This was the main "boost" that made companies start looking at data protection as a financial risk that they had to ensure and control.

The emergence of the position of "Data Protection Officer - the DPO" has also changed the paradigm of organizations by imposing the existence of a position that reports directly to the highest level of the organization on all issues related to the protection of personal data.

In June 2019, Contisystems took another step on the road to information security management with ISO 27001 certification, which reflects the recognition of the work done so far to protect our customers' data.

Ensure data protection and prevent

Twenty months after the General Data Protection Regulation came into force, we see that it has acted as a catalyst to put data protection at the heart of the debate in a wide variety of sectors.

With this path and several years of practice in data management, we have invested in the technical and organizational measures that we consider most critical to ensuring data protection and preventing data breaches. We can't resist sharing a few examples:

Raising awareness and training staff in information security and data protection;
Data Loss Protection technical solutions, multi-factor authentication, monitoring platforms, incident management applications, among others;
Data protection by design and by default, including prior impact assessments that allow us to effectively apply protection principles and include the necessary guarantees in the processing. In this way, we simultaneously protect our legal compliance and the rights of data subjects.

Contisystems has always acted diligently to protect its data and the data entrusted to it by its clients. Data Protection Day is always marked to keep in mind the importance of this issue in everyone's daily lives.