The GDPR at the Organizational Level: A Comparative Study of Eight European Countries

Abstract

The General Data Protection Regulation, also known as the ‘gold standard’ or the ‘Magna Carta’ of cyber laws, is a European regulation that deals with rights in the area of privacy and focuses on data collection, storage and data processing. This manuscript presents the results of investigation in the business sphere from eight countries of the European Union. The research focused on awareness of the GDPR, costs associated with the GDPR, number of trainings, how data are secured and subjective evaluation. The questionnaire was used for data collection. The results show that the majority of employees concerned about the GDPR are able to define the GDPR correctly (64%). The correct identification of personal data is in 95% of cases. The vast majority of respondents (94%) assign the right to personal data protection to the GDPR. Most employees are trained in the GDPR once (46%) or twice (45%). Subsequently, the differences between these countries in some areas of the questionnaire survey were examined. For this purpose, Welch ANOVA with post-test Tukey HSD or Kruskal-Wallis test were used. As a result, knowledge about the personal data do not vary significantly between the countries. In the area of rights, the countries are not again statistically different. As for the number of security countries, statistics do not differ significantly. The subjective assessment of the GDPR is different across the countries. The GDPR is rated worst by companies in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. On the contrary, the GDPR is best perceived by companies in France and the United Kingdom.