The new right to personal data portability in Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of 27 April 2016.

Abstract

This paper examines the right to portability granted in article 20 of the General Data Protection Regulation, namely a right to receive certain personal data in a structured, commonly used and machinereadable format, and transmit them —or have them transmitted directly—  to a third party. Several issues are considered, the main ones being the notion of personal data and defining which of them are portable, the preconditions for the data subject to enjoy the right, the content of the right, and the limits it is affected by. Afterwards, the goals and benefits of the right to data portability, as well as its weaknesses and potentially negative side-effects, are addressed.