Leave politics out of data protection
Few people with online accounts can be unaware of the imminent arrival of GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation. For weeks companies have been bombarding customers, asking for permission to continue sending and extracting the personal information they had previously agreed to share. The GDPR is the biggest shake-up in data privacy laws for 20 years, a period that has seen extraordinary advances in communications technology. To put it into context, in 1998 Google had only just been founded and Facebook did not exist.
The GDPR is an EU measure, albeit one largely framed by UK officials, that seeks to bring the regulatory framework up to speed. Like many such measures, however, what started out with benign intentions has become a bureaucratic nightmare for companies, especially small and medium-sized enterprises.
People are understandably worried about the risks to their data and tighter laws are needed to ensure it is not misused. The Data Protection Bill going through Parliament gives additional powers to the Information Commissioner to deal with data breaches. Yet this is the very Bill that was hijacked by peers and MPS to further their vendetta against the press rather than focus on the real abuses taking place in the communications sphere. People are still being scammed on an industrial scale and cold-calling remains rife despite umpteen promises to stop it. Yet the only time we have seen the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in full dudgeon recently was when the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica was accused of helping the cause of Brexit and Donald Trump.
The ICO is going to occupy an increasingly important role as the new data protection laws bed in; so it is vital that it avoids doing anything that smacks of responding to a political agenda. The hue and cry against Cambridge Analytica would never have happened had its customers been Barack Obama or Jeremy Corbyn. The law must be applied equally and without fear or favour.
There is also a danger of over-regulation. The new ICO powers include no-notice inspections, compelling organisations to hand over information and making it an offence to destroy, falsify or conceal evidence. Stopping criminals is one thing but the temptation to go for the easy target must be resisted and law-abiding businesses spared a heavy-handed approach.