http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/european-data-law-impeding-studies-diabetes-and-alzheimer-s-researchers-warn

For many people, the most apparent effect of the European privacy law called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been a flourishing of website pop-ups, demanding your consent to store browsing behavior as cookies. An annoyance, perhaps, but hardly more than an inconvenience. For Francis Collins, director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), however, the regulation has turned out to be a serious impediment to research.

Since 1993, Collins has been principal investigator for a project studying type 2 diabetes in Finnish people, who have relatively homogenous genetics and detailed health records. Finland's National Institute for Health and Welfare has sent 32,000 DNA samples to Collins's laboratory. He and his U.S. collaborators used the data to discover more than 200 places in the genome where variants increase the risk of illness. But in May 2018, when GDPR came into force, the Finnish institute stopped all data sharing on the project, because NIH could not provide guarantees that would satisfy the institute's interpretations of the law's requirements. Progress has since "slowed to a crawl," Collins says.