As the pandemic takes hold, an unwelcome distraction comes with news that an internal Labour Party report into how it dealt with antisemitism has been leaked, showing up in the hands of some of the dumbest people in left-wing politics. The document was unredacted, and contains the personal data of multiple complainants to the party. […]
I’m not the first person to point out that the current flood of Covid-19 emails are reminiscent of the Great GDPR Consent Panic of 2018. Organisations you have no memory of ever interacting with are suddenly there as well as many household names, reassuring you of their ability to keep going despite the crisis. Some […]
A few months ago, the ICO received a Freedom of Information request on What Do They Know from a ‘Dwayne Dibbley’, asking interesting questions about the recruitment of Ellis Parry to the post of ICO Data Ethics Adviser. As soon as the post was announced, I was interested in how it came about because in […]
During the hysteria in the run-up to May 2018, one of the ways in which it was easy to spot GDPR practitioners whose sole Data Protection experience was doing That Dreadful Course Run By Those Awful People was their lack of awareness of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003, known to its friends as […]
The Times published an interesting story on Saturday about businesses being approached by the Information Commissioner’s Office. According to the story, thousands of small business owners and landlords have received “heavy-handed” letters about the annual fee which many organisations are liable to pay under the Data Protection Act 2018. The GDPR abolished the requirement for […]
There’s never a good time to accidentally publish a huge batch of personal data online, but the interregnum between Christmas and New Year, when nothing happens and most people are bored is a particularly unfortunate moment to choose. The Cabinet Office’s foul-up in publishing the home addresses of the thousand or so people in receipt […]
Another day, another story in the Observer about Dominic Cummings and the Brexit vote, inspired (if that is ever the right word in this context) by revelations from Ian Lucas, the former MP for Wrexham. Lucas did not stand in the 2019 General Election and his former seat went to the Tories. Notwithstanding his decision […]
The OpenRightsGroup currently have a tool on their website to make subject access requests to political parties; they say that it is intended to investigate political profiling: “Who do political parties think we are?” is the heading on the page. There is definitely a problem with the way all parties use personal data, and the […]
Most people have little routines that they enjoy on a Sunday. Doing a spot of gardening, going for a run – I know one person who relishes his Sunday trip to the tip. For me, a minor weekend pleasure is the masochistic ritual of reading a maddeningly ill-informed article about Data Protection in the Guardian […]
The use of personal data to advance political causes has never had as high a profile as it does now, thanks mainly to Brexit and the lurid tales of data manipulation usually bundled under the vague heading of the ‘Cambridge Analytica scandal’. Thanks to the efforts of certain journalists, the narrative is now fixed. Cambridge […]
