The EU buys more from Türkiye than anyone else. According to the European Commission’s trade profile for Türkiye, about 41% of Turkish goods exports went to the EU in 2024, and the share keeps climbing. Nearly every company behind those shipments holds some EU personal data: a buyer’s name in the CRM, a webshop account, a logistics contact, a support ticket. That data puts the exporter inside the GDPR, and a KVKK compliance file won’t answer the questions an EU customer’s procurement team is going to ask. KVKK and GDPR look alike, and the 2024 amendments brought them closer. They’re still two laws with two regulators, two sets of paperwork and very different fine ceilings. This article walks through the eight places where a KVKK-compliant Turkish exporter falls short of GDPR, covers both directions of data flow, and ends with a roadmap that reflects how long this stuff actually takes. Why KVKK Compliance Doesn’t Make a Turkish Exporter GDPR-Ready Law No. 6698 was written to line Türkiye up with the EU’s 1995 Data Protection Directive. It came into force in April 2016, a few weeks before the EU adopted the GDPR. That timing explains most of what follows. KVKK inherited
The CNIL‘s screening rule sounds simple: hit two of the nine high-risk criteria, and you owe a full Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA). The trouble starts when you hit one or none, because the GDPR never says that skipping the DPIA means skipping assessment altogether. Plenty of processing falls outside the CNIL’s screening rules: operations below the two-criteria threshold, activities on the CNIL’s exemption list, processing already covered by an earlier DPIA, and controllers who answer to a different supervisory authority altogether. In every one of those cases, the Article 35 GDPR DPIA obligation may fall away while the risk assessment obligations under Articles 24 and 32 stay exactly where they were. This article maps the scenarios where CNIL criteria don’t apply and what a defensible assessment strategy looks like when they don’t. DPIA vs General Risk Assessment: Core Distinctions Under GDPR These two assessments get conflated constantly, and the mix-up has real consequences. They rest on different legal bases, serve different purposes, and trigger under different conditions. Article 35 GDPR requires a DPIA where processing is “likely to result in a high risk” to people’s rights and freedoms, and it requires the assessment before processing begins. The DPIA looks
Researchers who buy second-hand drives off online marketplaces keep finding the same thing: live data. A widely cited study by Blancco Technology Group found that 42% of used drives sold on eBay still held recoverable information, including financial records and personal data the previous owners assumed was long gone. The drives were not hacked; they were thrown away by organizations that treated deleting a file as the same thing as destroying it. Secure data disposal is where many compliance programs fail. ISO 27001, SOC 2, and GDPR all demand it, but they describe it in different languages, enforce it through different mechanisms, and punish failure in very different ways. This article sets out what each framework requires, where the requirements overlap, and how to run a single disposal program that satisfies all three at once. Why Secure Data Disposal Matters Across Compliance Frameworks Disposal is the last link in the data lifecycle, and the easiest one to skip. An organization can run flawless access controls, encryption, and monitoring for years and still cause a reportable breach the moment one unwiped laptop leaves the building. A recoverable drive in a recycling skip is functionally identical to an open database on the
HIPAA and GDPR are the two most consequential data protection frameworks any healthcare or technology organisation is likely to encounter. They share a common purpose, protecting sensitive personal data, but they differ significantly in scope, enforcement mechanisms, and compliance obligations. For organisations operating across the Atlantic, understanding where they align, where they clash, and how to satisfy both simultaneously is not optional. It is a legal necessity. What Is HIPAA? The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act was enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1996. Its original purpose was to modernise the flow of healthcare information and ensure the portability of health insurance coverage. Over time, it became primarily known for its data protection requirements, administered by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and enforced by the Office for Civil Rights (OCR). HIPAA is built around three core rules. The Privacy Rule governs how Protected Health Information (PHI) may be used and disclosed. The Security Rule sets standards for safeguarding electronic PHI (ePHI). The Breach Notification Rule establishes mandatory reporting timelines when PHI is compromised. Who Needs to Be HIPAA Compliant? HIPAA applies to covered entities, healthcare providers, health plans, and healthcare clearinghouses, and to their business
Plenty of companies treat an ISO 27001 certificate as proof of GDPR compliance. It is not. The two frameworks overlap heavily, but they answer different questions, and the gap between them is exactly where regulators tend to look. ISO 27001 tells you how to build a defensible security program. GDPR tells you what the law expects when that program touches personal data. Run one without understanding the other, and you will either over-engineer security you do not strictly need, or miss privacy obligations that carry real financial exposure. This article maps where ISO 27001 and GDPR meet, where they part ways, and how to run them as a single coordinated effort rather than two competing projects. What Is ISO 27001? ISO/IEC 27001 is the international standard for an Information Security Management System, or ISMS. The current edition is ISO 27001:2022. It is not a checklist of technical fixes. It is a management framework: a structured, repeatable way to identify information security risks, decide how to treat them, document those decisions, and improve over time. Clauses 4 to 10 of the standard define the mandatory ISMS requirements, covering leadership, risk assessment, internal audit, and management review. Annex A then lists 93
