EDPS releases its 2019 annual report

In its newly released 2019 Annual Report, the EU’s EDPS provided insights into all EDPS activities in 2019, which was the last year of a five-year EDPS mandate. EDPS activities focused on consolidating the achievements of previous years, assessing the progress made and starting to define priorities for the future. In 2019, the EDPS has continued to work closely with the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) to both provide and support the EDPB secretariat and to contribute, as a member of the EDPB, to initiatives aimed at ensuring the consistent application of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) across the EU. This included working with the EDPB to produce the first joint EDPS and EDPB Opinion and jointly issuing advice to the European Parliament. In addition to this, a significant focus of EDPS work in 2019 was on developing and sharing technological expertise. Among other initiatives, the EDPS launched TechDispatch, a regular online publication providing information on new technologies and their data protection impact. The institution also developed and shared the Website Evidence Collector (WEC), a tool that can be used to determine websites’ compliance with data protection rules. The EDPS was expected to present the Annual Report to the European Parliament this week. However, the hearing was cancelled due to restrictions relating to the COVID-19 outbreak.