Giovanni Butarelli is the European Data Protection Supervisor, the body in charge of Data Protection in the European Union. He ends his five-year term at the end of 2019.

He is a Judge of the Court of Cassation since 1989. Between 1997 and 2009 he was the General Secretary of Garante per la protezione dei dati personali,  the Italian Data Protection Authority. He served as Assistant Supervisor of the EDPS, between 2009 and 2014.

During his tenures as Assistant and Supervisor, the General Data Protection Regulation was developed and implemented. That is why he deserves the proper recognition in this series.

In an interview he stated that checking a box with  “I Consent” to terms and conditions – when reading those terms and conditions would take two days to read –  is not really giving a Consent.

In another column, he points out that ” The message that the GDPR sends to the world, that personal data is about the dignity of the human being and the trust of the consumer, cannot be understated in importance “. He concludes that “he is waiting the moment that the RGPD will be applied to ensure compliance with the law, but also hoping to promote public goodwill instead of finding gaps in an excessively complex text”.

We can listen to Butarelli at the closure of the 12th International Conference of Computers, Privacy & Data Protection, in Brussels, 2019.