European legislation comes in two parts – the first part is a long explanatory note called the recitals, and the second part is the Articles, the actual meat of the law. Especially because the recitals are a very long series of paragraphs without headings or subdivisions, they can be very off-putting. My advice is always to start with the articles and then go back to the recitals, especially with the GDPR. Because amended versions of the UK GDPR are often presented without the recitals (because they’ve not been amended), some people think that the recitals were left behind when we left the EU. But they’re still part of the GDPR – look at the UK GDPR on legislation.gov.uk and you can see the recitals are still there as ‘Introductory Text’. I’ve gone through the recitals to highlight some of the more interesting aspects of them, and that’s it.