The Personal Data Under the GDPR: Concept, Elements, and Boundaries

The concept of personal data plays a foundational role in data protection law. The application of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as well as virtually all other national or transnational legislation that regulates the processing of personal data, depends on the identification of an actual personal data. Despite being a concept that is perfectly consolidated, especially within the European Union, its exact boundaries continue to raise some questions from an application point of view, particularly with regard to the element of identifiable. 

In this article, we intend to examine the origins of the concept of personal data and analyse its various elements and boundaries under the GDPR.