With fines of up to € 20 million or 4 % of global turnover (whichever is greater), the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the single most important data protection law that has hit Enterprise Data Management in history. The cost of complying with what is these days already considered an international standard for privacy management, has already forced many companies controlling and processing personal data to leave the EU market, close key businesses and even shut down entirely.

SPECIAL (Scalable Policy-aware Linked Data Architecture for Privacy, Transparency and Compliance), a European Commission funded Research and Innovation project, aspires to help organizations operating in the EU overcome the fear of the proverbial red tape by proposing technical solutions which ensure compliance with such regulations without killing innovation or efficiency. Driven by the real-world needs and use cases of Proximus, Deutsche Telekom and Thomson Reuters, industry giants and project partners, SPECIAL aims to deliver technology which would enable:

• Personal data discovery in large enterprise environments
• Efficient and legal acquisition of data subjects’ consent
• Tracking data usage, along with the context it is being used in
• Compliance with both legislative and user-specified policies for all data processing activities
• Privacy-aware, secure workflows with access control
• Performance and scalability, and
• Mechanisms for control and feedback, making privacy in Big Data comprehensible and manageable for data subjects, controllers, and processors alike.