Report

Data Protection and Digital Information Bill

This report from UK think tank the Social Market Foundation argues that the Bill is a threat to fair markets and open public services.

The Data Protection and Digital Information Bill, currently at Committee stage in the House of Lords, is set to undermine vital rights that protect vulnerable consumers and help workers understand how they are monitored by companies and public bodies.

This Social Market Foundation briefing argues that the Bill is a threat to fair markets and open public services. The government is seeking to fundamentally alter the UK’s data protection regime through a Bill reforming the UK GDPR. As well as threatening the UK’s ‘data adequacy’ determination from the EU (which allows data to freely flow between the UK and EU), it undermines crucial rights that vulnerable workers and consumers have come to rely on. It will be easier for organisations to ignore requests and take longer to resolve disputes; processing will be easier in many areas, such as excessive data collection on gig economy workers; and a new definition of personal data may drastically reduce protections for ‘pseudonymised’ data, including that processed by third party processors often used by the gambling industry.

The briefing recommends that the new ‘recognised legitimate interests’ should be removed, retaining the requirement to consider how data processing affects individuals. The new and lower thresholds to refuse data subject requests should be removed, and the new definition of personal data must be clarified. Finally, representative bodies should be empowered to bring claims and ‘super-complaints’ on behalf of data subjects to improve levels of legal compliance.