Data Protection Regulation

Collections of free text – whether in database fields, documents or email archives – present a challenge both for operations and under data protection law. They may contain personal data but it's hard to find: whether you're trying to use it, to ensure compliance with the data protection principles, or to allow data subjects to exercise their legal rights. Some level of risk is unavoidable in these collections, but there are ways to reduce it.

When incident response teams (CSIRTs) detect an attack on their systems, they normally report details back to the network or organisation from which the attack comes. This can have two benefits for the reporter: in the short term, making the attack stop; in the longer term helping that organisation to improve the security of its systems so they are less likely to be used in future attacks.

Article 22 of the GDPR contains a new, and oddly-worded, "right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing". This only applies to decisions that "produce[] legal effects … or similarly significantly affect[]" the individual. Last year, the Article 29 Working Party's draft guidance on interpreting this Article noted that an automated refusal to hire a bicycle – because of insufficient credit – might reach this threshold.

In thinking about the legal arrangements for Jisc's learning analytics services we consciously postponed incorporating medical and other information that Article 9(1) of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) classifies as Special Category Data (SCD): "personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, or trade union membership, and the processing of genetic data, biometric data for the purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person, data concerning health or data concerning a natural person's sex life or sexual orientation" (mo