KVKK vs GDPR: What Changed in 2024 and What Still Differs

Five items: (1) VERBIS registration with the KVKK's category taxonomy, plus a local representative if you have no Turkish establishment; (2) Turkish-language notices following the KVKK's format communiqué, its content requirements are more prescriptive than GDPR Articles 13-14; (3) explicit-consent mechanics where Turkish law still requires them (much electronic marketing, some sensitive-data flows); (4) the transfer workflow: executed Turkish SCCs filed with the Board within 5 business days, adequacy tracking as decisions are issued; (5) breach notification re-pointed at the Board on the 72-hour practice with the KVKK's breach form. DSAR handling ports with a clock change: KVKK requires response within 30 days.

GDPR consent and KVKK explicit consent are drafted to the same standard: freely given, specific, informed, unambiguous. The difference is workload. GDPR programs shift most processing onto contract, legal obligation, or legitimate interest; KVKK recognizes analogous grounds (Article 5's conditions, including legitimate interest), but Turkish practice, guidance and Board decisions, keeps consent central for marketing and many digital flows, and the co-applicable Law No. 6563 on electronic commerce requires opt-in for commercial electronic messages with its own İYS registry. Post-2024 sensitive data runs on a GDPR-like condition list rather than consent-only.

VERBIS: controllers above thresholds, and all foreign controllers processing Turkish data, must register publicly before processing, describing purposes, categories, recipients, transfers, retention, and security measures, and keep it current. GDPR abolished general registration in 2018; Turkey kept it, and the registry's public searchability makes gaps discoverable by anyone. Foreign controllers must additionally appoint a Turkey-based representative whose mandate covers KVKK correspondence and data-subject contact, an appointment with corporate formality (board resolution, filing), unlike the lighter GDPR Article 27 designation.

Architecturally they match: adequacy, appropriate safeguards, derogations. The differences are procedural. Turkey's SCCs are KVKK-published forms, executed as-is and notified to the Board within 5 business days on pain of a separate fine, no EU analogue. Turkey's adequacy list is being built decision by decision (country, sector, or organization-level), so most current flows run on safeguards. BCR approvals and Board-approved undertakings remain available. And the derogation for occasional transfers is policed as genuinely occasional. An EU transfer file is a good template for the Turkish one, but the instruments and filings are distinct documents.

Neither, uniformly. GDPR is stricter on accountability infrastructure (mandatory DPOs and DPIAs in defined cases, records under Article 30, turnover-scaled fines) and on automated decision-making. KVKK is stricter procedurally: public registration, local representative, prescriptive notice format, consent-heavy marketing enforced through an active complaints pipeline, the 5-day SCC filing, and criminal penalties (imprisonment for unlawful recording, disclosure, or failure to destroy data) that give individual managers personal exposure. Companies get fined in Turkey for administrative gaps a GDPR program would never surface, which is why the Turkish annex to a global program is mostly process, not principle.