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Media Azi: Room for Abuse in the New Draft Law on Personal Data Protection?

10 April 2018
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As citizens, we want our personal data to be protected. Weren’t we all outraged when we found out about the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, when the privacy of more than 50 million FB users was breached?

As journalists, however, especially when we investigate serious cases of corruption, such as the stolen billion in the Republic of Moldova, we need free access to information of public interest. We don’t want the law on personal data protection to turn into a shield protecting the government. We want the deeds of public figures, as well as their, sometimes less clean, personal businesses, to be disclosed to the general public.

Often, however, such information requests, coming from journalists, are rejected by the state institutions on the grounds that allegedly... they would violate the Law on Personal Data Protection.  

What do in fact, personal data, represent? Is there any line drawn between personal and public data? What degree of confidentiality can the personal data of a civil servant have compared to those of an ordinary citizen? And, as we often refer to the European states, how do things in the European Union stand in this regard?

To these and other questions you can find the answer in the Media Azi talk show, edition 71, where the guest of the journalist Nicolae Negru – the host of the show, was the personal data protection expert, Sergiu Bozianu.

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“Media Azi” broadcast is weekly produced by the Independent Journalism Center. It is intended to disclose the problems faced at present by the journalists of the domestic media and to identify solutions to hem. The broadcast may be viewed on the websites www.moldova-azi.md, www.media-azi.md and mediacritica.md, as well as on the Youtube channel of the Independent Journalism Center. 

The broadcast was produced with the financial support of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, provided by the means of the Embassy of Sweden in Chisinau.