Personas datu aizsardzības mērķis un tiesiskā regulējuma vēsturiskā attīstība

Nowadays, the right to privacy is indispensable in every democratic society and inclusion of such rights in the constitution, guarantees legally freedom of action of a natural person and, simultaneously, implementation of other human rights established in the fundamental law of the state. The institute of personal data protection was established by expanding the understanding of the content of the right to privacy in the 70’s of the 19th century, when the government of several European countries initiated information processing projects, such as population census etc. For the development of information technology, more and more information on persons was kept and processed in electronic form. One of the legal problems was gathering of information on natural persons and the right to privacy. In order to ensure the protection of privacy, separate European countries, on their own initiative, established a law on data protection. The first laws on the protection of personal data in Europe were established in the Federal Republic of Germany, then in Sweden (1973), Norway (1978) and elsewhere. Not all countries adopted laws on data protection at the same time, so the Council of Europe decided to elaborate a convention to unify data protection rules and principles