New Austrian Data Protection Law – undermining GDPR

Austria’s governing parties passed a new law on data protection in the last month. This new law, which was intendet to implement the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), complicates the enforcement of the new EU-wide data protection rules. This developement is result of a change in policy. Three years ago Austria’s justice minister complained that the EU’s forthcoming data protection rules were to weak, nowadays, the new government in Vienna says they are too strong.

It has been suggested, that the governing parties in Vienna are trying to turn the coountry into a sort of ‘safe haven’ – by complicating enforcement of the GDPR.

Purpose of the GDPR is, inter alia, to hand back the control of personal data to the data subjects. This aim could be undermined by the new provisions regarding the sanctions.

The GDPR stipulates, that sanctions are imposed by DPAs without any condition and without a room for specification or changes to member states’ law. In contrast to this the new Austrian data protection law contains a term that requires warnings before launching sanctions against violating firms. It must be feared, that most infringements will go unpunished.

The responsibles of the Austrian Data Protection Authority tried to weaken the concerns: The authority will still decide on a case-by-case basis whether to impose administrative fines or not – even it is the first violation of the company.

It remains to be seen how the new law will be applied in the future.