Civil fault resulting from violating personal data protection controls

Othman, Dr/Ahmed Ali Hassan

doi:10.21608/mjle.2023.320325

Civil fault resulting from violating personal data protection controls"A comparative study between French, European and Egyptian legislation"

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Dr/Ahmed Ali Hassan Othman

Faculty of Law - Zagazig University

10.21608/mjle.2023.320325

Abstract

This research is dedicated to carefully discussing civil tort resulting from violating the legal protection of personal data. To carry out this objective it was necessary to divide the research into two chapters. whilst the first chapter is concerned with civil tort caused by failure to comply with legal determinants governing processing personal data , the second one is mainly concerned with tort arising from violating procedural determinants regulating processing the personal data including failure to fulfill obligations conferred upon the processing entity ( i.e. duty to inform the person whose data is being processed , duty to inform the owner of the data of the purpose of the processing, obligation to provide the owner of the data with knowledge about the period during which the data will be kept in addition to obligation to inform the owner when the data is transferred outside the countries of the EU ) or when the purpose of the processing is illegitimate. Furthermore, civil tort is legally established when processing the data is done without the consent of the owner or regardless of his rejection, besides the case where the data processed is categorized as being sensitive . This category includes data related to political, religious beliefs or racial origins. Also if the entity processing the data did not secure the approval of the competent administrative entity, the processing activity would be deemed illegal. The same approach is adopted when that entity does not manage to implement an evaluation of the effect of processing on scope of protection of the processed data. Finally, it can be stated that when personal data is processed without exerting reasonable care and this improper processing results in hacking this data, the civil tort has legal grounds to rest upon . All of the above is preceded by an introductory chapter in which we dealt with the definition of personal data and its legal characteristics.

Keywords