The US and Canada have observed Data Privacy Day every January 28th since 2008. It is a follow-on to Data Protection Day in Europe that commemorates the Jan. 28, 1981 signing of the Council of Europe treaty known as Convention 108. This treaty was the first legally binding agreement designed to protect an individual’s right to digital privacy, anticipating the increasingly automated processing and distribution of personal data.
While remarkably prescient, the original authors and signers of Convention 108 could not have possibly foreseen how data would be being created, shared, processed, and stored today, nor the volume of personal data that exists for virtually every human being on earth.
