Personal data is personal. It’s about living human beings. But with its ‘reform’ proposals, the UK government aims to put citizens’ data up for sale on global markets. A commodity to be traded. Like pork bellies or copper or debt.
The ‘Data: A New Direction’ consultation, which ends this Friday (November 19), has introduced the biggest wholesale attack on the rights of UK citizens in decades.
In his ministerial foreward to the consultation paper, published in September, then culture secretary Oliver Dowden said reforms are needed because existing General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) inherited from Europe are “unnecessarily complex or vague”. He said the government wants to end the “persistent uncertainty” that has prevailed since their introduction. But it uses even greater vagueness, apparently deliberately: words like ‘responsible’ (which appears 52 times in the consultation) and ‘safeguards’ (95 times) every time it’s introducing an attack on citizen rights – which the consultation never bothers to define. And, if implemented, it will produce even more uncertainty, which will last much longer than just three years.
