In the context of the continuous advance of information technologies and
biomedicine, and of the creation of economic blocs, this work analyzes
the role that data protection plays in the integration of markets. It
puts special emphasis on financial and insurance services. Further, it
identifies the differences in the data protection systems of EU member
states and examines the development of common standards and principles
of data protection that could help build a data protection model for
Mercosur. Divided into four parts, the book starts out with a discussion
of the evolution of the right to privacy, focusing on the last few
decades, and taking into account the development of new technologies.
The second part discusses the interaction between data protection and
specific industries that serve as case studies: insurance, banking and
credit reporting. The focus of this part is on generalization and
discrimination, adverse selection and the processing of sensitive and
genetic data. The third part of the book presents an analysis of the
legislation of three EU Member States (France, Italy and UK). Specific
elements of analysis that are compared are the concepts of personal and
anonymous data, data protection principles, the role of the data
protection authorities, the role of the data protection officer, data
subjects' rights, the processing of sensitive data, the processing of
genetic data and the experience of the case studies in processing data.
The book concludes with the proposal of a model for data protection that
could be adopted by Mercosur, taking into account the different levels
of data protection that exist in its member states.
