Nearly two decades after the EU first enacted data protection rules, key questions about the nature and scope of this EU policy, and the harms it seeks to prevent, remain unanswered. The inclusion of a Right to Data Protection in the EU Charter has increased the salience of these questions, which must be addressed in order to ensure the legitimacy, effectiveness and development of this Charter right and the EU data protection regime more generally. The Foundations of EU Data Protection Law is a timely and important work which sheds new light on this neglected area of law, challenging the widespread assumption that data protection is merely a subset of the right to privacy. By positioning EU data protection law within a comprehensive conceptual framework, it argues that data protection has evolved from a regulatory instrument into a fundamental right in the EU legal order and that this right grants individuals more control over more forms of data than the right to privacy. It suggests that this dimension of the right to data protection should be explicitly recognised, while identifying the practical and conceptual limits of individual control over personal data. At a time when EU data protection law is sitting firmly in the international spotlight, this book offers academics, policy-makers, and practitioners a coherent vision for the future of this key policy and fundamental right in the EU legal order, and how best to realise it.

"The ideas presented in this concise and thoughtfully structured book lay a strong groundwork for the normative understanding of European data protection law, a subject frequently described as difficult to grasp but all the more relevant to current and future societies and legislation." - Merlin Gömann, Common Market Law Review

"This is a book certainly worth reading for everyone interested in a more fundamental analysis of the right to data protection in the European Union (EU). It is impressive how Lynskey manages to present her analysis of the subject, which is widely acknowledged as complicated, in such an accessible manner. She is not afraid of addressing difficult questions which other data protection scholars may raise but ultimately leave unresolved, to be reflected upon later." - Herke Kranenborg, International Data Privacy Law