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Personal Data Regulations in Colombia: The New Legal Trend for Companies 

July, 2013 - Brigard & Urrutia

Personal data regulation is a recently developed topic in the legal realm. In 1970, the first laws on the matter were issued in Europe and North America. Specifically, the first data protection law called the Bundesdatenschutzgesetz was issued in Germany on October 7, 1970, and the same year the United States Congress issued the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which controls the collection, use and redistribution of any consumer information. These two regulations are the embryonic moment of a new topic that is critical for contemporary, globalized and technologized societies, namely, the protection of privacy and, more specifically, the legal protection to any information that is associated with a determinate or determinable personal.


Most probably anybody has experienced that the internet, the technology and globalization, as it was pointed out by professor Anthony Giddens in his book Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping our Lived, has not only reshaped our lives and way of thinking, but also has renewed and reestablish the boundaries between what is considered private and what is considered to be public and, therefore, beyond the protection of any regulations. The social issue at stake is how is my privacy going to be protected by contemporary legal systems, but perhaps even a further question might be asked: is the information associated with my personality and intimacy worthy of legal protection, considering that Companies nowadays tend to recollect personal data to shape consumer behavior, to promote their products and services, or even to consult your credit score if you entered into a commercial relation with them? Companies have the need to recollect information that help them understand their clients in their intimacy or, at least, to recollect basic information to promote their business. Of course, the questions are: (i) how is personal data going to be protected? (ii) What kind of regulation might be sufficiently effective to protect the personal information that Companies, Public Entities and other institutions gather from individuals? (iii) Can data protection regulation be counterproductive, considering the aims that they tend to achieve?



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