As we all endure the lockdown and the uncertainty about when and how it might end, I have been trying to avoid thinking about the past. It’s tempting to dwell on the last time I went to the cinema (Home, Manchester ironically to watch ‘The Lighthouse’), the last time I went to a pub (Tweedies in Grasmere, just hours before Johnson closed them all), the last face-to-face training course I ran (lovely people, awful drive home). But thinking back to what I had, and the uncertainty about how, when and if I will get it back, doesn’t make the interminable Groundhog Days move any faster. I’d be better off just ploughing on and working out what to do next.
So it was a strange experience to be thrown backwards in time to the heady days of 2017, when the GDPR frenzy was at its height, and the world and his dog were setting up GDPR consultancies. People still make fun of the outdated nature of my company name, but I registered 2040 Training in 2008, and I’m proud of its pre-GDPR nomenclature. The list of GDPR-themed companies that are now dissolved is a melancholy roll call – goodbye GDPR Ltd, GDPR Assist (not that one), GDPR Assistance, GDPR Certification Group (got to admire their optimism), GDPR Claims, GDPR Compliance, GDPR Compliance Consulting, GDPR Compliance Consultancy, GDPR Compliance for SMEs and GDPR Consultants International (offices in New York, Paris and Peckham). You are all with the Angels now.
I was cast into this reverie by a friend who drew my attention to GDPR Legal, a relatively new GDPR company, and a few moments on their website was like climbing into a DeLorean. It was all there. The professional design, the ability to provide all possible services related to Data Protection (you can get a DPO for as little as £100 a month), and of course “qualified DPO’s (sic)”. I was disappointed that there was no mention of them being certified and nary a hint of the IBITGQ, but you can’t have everything. They still pulled out some crowdpleasers, including flatulent business speak and the obvious fact that they are trying to sell software, sometimes in the same couple of sentences: “Our service includes a comprehensive consult to help identify gaps and opportunities, a comprehensive report that includes a project plan with timelines and milestones, a cost analysis, and a schedule. We also offer a software suite that will help you get there quickly and smoothly.” Timelines and milestones, people. This is what we want.
The lack of any detail is possibly a matter for concern. The website claims that the company’s specialists have “over 50 years of experience delivering a pragmatic consulting service with qualified DPO’s and GDPR Practitioner skills” but it is difficult to find out who any of them are. There is no ‘meet the team’ or ‘our people’ section. I might be wrong, but I don’t think there’s a single human being’s name anywhere on there. If you had all these brilliant experienced professionals, wouldn’t you want to advertise who they are – I might make fun of them, but even the folk who have blocked me on LinkedIn aren’t ashamed of saying who their consultants are. Is it 50 people with a year’s experience each? Indeed, the only name I can associate with the company (via Companies House) is the Director, a man who has no experience in Data Protection, but is also director of a shedload of software and marketing companies. Any time the site needs to get into any detail, it hyperlinks to the ICO.
So far, so what? You probably think this blog is cruel. If someone wants to set up a company selling GDPR services, why do I care? Isn’t this just sour grapes at another disruptive entrant in the vibrant GDPR market?
There are two reasons why I call these people out. The first is their privacy policy. It’s not a good sign when a privacy policy page on a GDPR company’s website begins with ‘Privacy Policy coming soon’, but as it happens, immediately below is the company’s privacy policy. Well, I say it’s their’s. It’s oddly formatted, and when you click on the links that are supposed to take you to the policy’s constituent parts, you’re in fact redirected to the log-in page for GoDaddy, with whom the site was registered. All the way through, there are lots of brackets in places that they don’t belong. It didn’t take me long to work out what was going on – I think the brackets were the elements of the template policy that GDPR Legal has used which needed to be personalised, and they’ve forgotten to remove them. 50 collective years of experience, and nobody is competent enough to write the company’s own privacy policy, they just use someone else’s template. Indeed, if you search for the first part of the policy “Important information and who we are“, it leads you to dozens of websites using the same template, from Visit Manchester to NHS Improvement. I can’t find where it originated, but it’s an indictment of the quality of work here that they took it off the shelf and didn’t even format it properly. My Privacy Policy is smart-arsery of the first order, but at least I wrote it myself.
The other reason is worse. GDPR Legal has a blog with three posts on it. Two are bland and short, but the most recent, published just this week, is much longer and more detailed. It reads very differently from other parts of the site, and there was something about the tone and structure that was familiar to me. It didn’t take long to remember where I had seen something like this before. The blog is about GDPR and children, and this is the second paragraph:
“Because kids are less aware of the risks involved in handing over their personal data, they need greater protection when you are collecting and processing their data.Here is a guide and checklist for what you need to know about GDPR and children’s data.”
This is the first sentence of the ICO’s webpage about GDPR and children:
“Children need particular protection when you are collecting and processing their personal data because they may be less aware of the risks involved.”
Coincidence, you think? This is the third line:
“If a business processes children’s personal data then great care and thought should be given about the need to protect them from the outset, and any systems and processes should be designed with this in mind”
This is the second line of the ICO’s page:
“If you process children’s personal data then you should think about the need to protect them from the outset, and design your systems and processes with this in mind”
Blog, fourth para:
“Compliance with the data protection principles and in particular fairness should be central to all processing of children’s personal data. ”
ICO page, third line:
“Compliance with the data protection principles and in particular fairness should be central to all your processing of children’s personal data”
They rejigged the first few elements a little, but after that, whoever was doing it evidently got bored and it’s pretty much word for word:
GDPR Legal Blog:
A business needs to have a lawful basis for processing a child’s personal data. Consent is one possible lawful basis for processing, but it is not the only option. Sometimes using an alternative basis is more appropriate and provides better protection for the child.
ICO page
“You need to have a lawful basis for processing a child’s personal data. Consent is one possible lawful basis for processing, but it is not the only option. Sometimes using an alternative basis is more appropriate and provides better protection for the child.”
GDPR Legal Blog
“General Checklists
- We comply with all the requirements of the GDPR, not just those specifically relating to children and included in this checklist.
- We design our processing with children in mind from the outset and use a data protection by design and by default approach.
- We make sure that our processing is fair and complies with the data protection principles.
- As a matter of good practice, we use DPIAs (data protection impact assessments) to help us assess and mitigate the risks to children.
- If our processing is likely to result in a high risk to the rights and freedom of children then we always do a DPIA.
- As a matter of good practice, we take children’s views into account when designing our processing.“
ICO page:
“Checklists
General
- We comply with all the requirements of the GDPR, not just those specifically relating to children and included in this checklist.
- We design our processing with children in mind from the outset, and use a data protection by design and by default approach.
- We make sure that our processing is fair and complies with the data protection principles.
- As a matter of good practice, we use DPIAs to help us assess and mitigate the risks to children.
- If our processing is likely to result in a high risk to the rights and freedom of children then we always do a DPIA.
- As a matter of good practice, we take children’s views into account when designing our processing.”
NB: I’ve screenshotted all of it.
Someone at GDPR Legal lifted the whole thing uncredited and passed it off as their own work. A company that claims to be able to provide “practical and bespoke advice”, guiding “major projects in some of the UK’s largest businesses” nicked content from the ICO’s website. This kind of cutting and pasting gives plagiarism a bad name. At least GDPR’s previous Grand Master Plagiarist did it in style with some top-drawer endorsements.
The GDPR frenzy is over. Some of the new entrants have gone from strength to strength, and some of them are now selling kitchens. The current crisis will test everyone, and I doubt that the DP landscape will look the same in a year’s time. Nevertheless, while I hope the data protection sector remains robust enough to accommodate both the slick, corporate operations, and a few maniac artisans like me, it surely doesn’t need chancers any more? I hope we can all agree that a company that can’t even design its own privacy policy, that won’t admit who its experts are, and who steals from the regulator deserves to be shamed? I hope this blog might persuade a few unwary punters to do some due diligence before handing over their cash and perhaps pick a company who writes their own material. Whatever the LinkedIn blockers think of me, and I of them, surely we’re all better than this?