The European Commission plans to unify data protection within the European Union (EU) with a single law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The current EU Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC does not consider important aspects like globalization and technological developments like social networks and cloud computing sufficiently and determined that new guidelines for data protection and privacy were required. Therefore a proposal for a regulation was released on 25 January 2012. Subsequently numerous amendments have been proposed in the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers. The EU’s European Council aims for adoption in late 2014 and the regulation is planned to take effect after a transition period of two years.