On 26 April 2006, the Council of Europe decided to launch a “Data Protection Day”, known also as “Privacy Day”, to be celebrated each year on 28 January.

This date corresponds to the anniversary of the opening for signature of the “Convention 108” which is the first binding international instrument on data protection matter and has been for over 30 years a cornerstone of data protection in Europe and beyond.

This is not a coincidence, data protection is internationally recognized as one of the human rights and fundamental freedoms, as more recently reaffirmed for Europe by the General Data Protection Regulation effective from the 25 May 2018. Protecting data means protecting not only what is intimately private but also defending the human dignity of individuals, in order for individuals not to be treated as mere objects.

The objective of Privacy Day is therefore to inform and educate the public at large as to their day-to-day rights. For many organizations, as well as RGI, the Privacy Day represents the occasion to raise awareness on data protection and inform people of rights and good practices in processing personal data fostering the prevention of the risks inherent and associated with the illegal data mishandling and unfair processing.

In RGI we regularly provide general training to all employees and dedicated modules for specific functions but we are also aware that the more we proceed in developing new and powerful products, in better answering to new customer’s behaviours and needs, in pursuing health and wellbeing within our company, the more we have to handle potential risks connected to privacy issues. To be able to recognize those risk and to put in place all necessary actions to ensure the data protection, we need to raise the awareness on such topics, a task that we share also with our Data Protection Officer.

So this year we took the chance and we decided to exploit this special day to launch a privacy “refresh” training, leveraging our internal RGI Academy with the scope to strengthen and enhance RGI employees’ knowledge both as data subject and as subject authorized for processing data: this is essential for us, acting mainly as data processor on behalf of our client, and in consideration of the relevance (both in terms of quality and quantity) of personal data processed by our company.