Is everything about to change?

With a UK general election at some point this year, a US election in November and European elections in June, a lot could change over the coming months. Obviously, in each case, it depends on who wins, but changes in the makeup of any government can significantly impact data protection. Will the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework be in safe hands if Trump wins? Or just orange hands? Also, over the last few years in Europe, we’ve had the Data Act, the Data Governance Act, the AI Act, a European Health Data Space and NIS2—an alphabet soup of new data-related laws (yet still no ePrivacy Act). Will this prolific legislative output continue? Or even increase, perhaps? And what of a prospective Labour Government? What are its plans? Is Sir Keir a ‘believer’ (in data protection)? A lot could change, and we may need to add a few more pages to next year’s publication.

But for now, back to this year. Plenty has been going on. The European Data Protection Board continues to wage its war against Adtech and cookies, and the CJEU has got busy examining many of GDPR’s finer—yet still important—points. New technology keeps throwing up new challenges, whether biometrics, automated decision-making or generative AI. We’re never short of content for this publication, and as with previous years, we could easily have produced a top fifteen or even a top twenty.

As ever, there wasn’t a lot of science applied to the order of the Top Ten, and we could have our arms twisted to reorder several of the articles. So, please read it with that in mind.

We hope you enjoy it.