Security of personal data. Part II – Identity in the 21st century

The technical progress that is presently taking place makes man not only a living organism in the world of nature, but also an avatar in the form of a package of bits in the virtual ICT space, which is created as a result and based on his activity on the Internet. This state of affairs means that the commonly known and used methods of identifying environmental data of natural persons have been extended by technologically advanced methods of marking the environmental identity of natural persons on the basis of annotated data attributed to them. However, identification is not limited to living natural persons, but is also required in certain situations to establish the identity of deceased individuals. The processing of data of deceased persons is not subject to rules set out in Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (commonly referred to as: GDPR). Such data are data about an individual. Despite the fact that in terms of content, data concerning a given person are at least identical to the personal data of a specific person during his or her lifetime, in the legal context their processing is carried out on the basis of provisions of other laws and regulations. This article complements the diptych bearing the common title Security of personal data, divided into 2 parts: Part I – Identity specifics in the 21st century and Part II – Identification in the 21st century.