“Data protection public register…find organisations and people registered with the ICO under the Data Protection Act”, says the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) website. Which is funny, because you can’t register with the ICO under the Data Protection Act.
Under the now-repealed 1995 European Data Protection Directive, given domestic effect in the UK by the now-repealed Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA98), all data controllers had to notify with their version of the ICO (unless they were exempt from doing so). And under section 19 of the now-repealed DPA98, the ICO had to keep a register and make it publicly available. The obvious way of doing that was to put it online.
It was a criminal offence to process personal data and not be notified (registered) with the ICO.
But, the General Data Protection Regulation (aka GDPR, and now to be known as the “EU GDPR”), did away with statutory notification as a matter of European law (on the grounds that it achieved nothing, and was an administrative headache). In the UK, where (as part of the notification scheme) controllers had to pay a fee to the ICO, this risked a major budget shortfall for the ICO. So, cleverly, we passed law that requires controllers to pay a fee purely to fund the ICO’s data protection work (the explanatory memo to that law even says it is “to make provision to ensure that the [Information Commissioner] has the financial resources necessary for the performance of her tasks and exercise of her powers”. Failure to pay this fee is a civil wrong, punishable by the imposition of a civil monetary penalty (of up to £4350). There is no requirement for the ICO to maintain a register, no requirement for it to be made public, and it is certainly not the case that what they do publish is a register of people “registered with the ICO under the Data Protection Act”.
What they publish is a non-statutory register of controllers who’ve paid their fee. Presence on that register says nothing other than that the controller has paid its fee.
The views in this post (and indeed most posts on this blog) are my personal ones, and do not represent the views of any organisation I am involved with.
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