Category Archives: Data Protection

August 11, 2017 · 8:24 am

Serious DCMS error about consent and data protection 

I blogged on Monday about the government Statement of Intent regarding the forthcoming Data Protection Bill. What I missed at the time was an accompanying release on the Department for Digital, Culture,  Media and Sport (DCMS) website.  Having now seen it, I realise why so many media outlets have been making a profoundly misleading statement about consent under the new data protection law: they have lifted it directly from DCMS. The statement is

The Data Protection Bill will require ‘explicit’ consent to be necessary for processing sensitive personal data

It should only take a second to realise how wrong this is: sensitive personal data will include information about, among other things, health, and criminal convictions. Is the government proposing, say, that, before passing on information about a critically injured patient to an A&E department, a paramedic will have to get the unconscious patient’s explicit consent? Is it proposing that before passing on information about a convicted sex offender to a local authority social care department the Disclosure and Barring Service will have to get the offender’s explicit consent? 

Of course not – it’s absolute nonsense to think so, and the parliamentary drafters of the forthcoming Bill would not dream of writing the law in such a way, not least because it would contravene our obligations under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) around which much of the Bill will be based. GDPR effectively mirrors the existing European Data Protection Directive (given effect in our existing Data Protection Act 1998). Under these laws, there are multiple circumstances under which personal data, and higher-category sensitive personal data can be processed. Consent is one of those. But there are, in Article 9(2) of GDPR, nine other conditions which permit the processing of special category data (the GDPR term used to replicate what is called “sensitive personal data” under existing domestic data protection law), and GDPR affords member states the power to legislate for further conditions.

What the DCMS release should say is that when consent is legitimately relied upon to process sensitive personal data the consent must be explicit. I know that sentence has got more words on it than the DCMS original, but that’s because sometimes a statement needs more words in order to be correct, and make sense, rather than mislead on a very important point regarding people’s fundamental rights.

I tweeted Matt Hancock, the minister, about the error, but with no answer as yet. I’ve also invited DCMS to correct it. The horse has already bolted though, as a Google news search for the offending phrase will show. The Information Commissioner’s Office has begun a series of pieces addressing GDPR myths, and I hope this is one they’ll talk about, but DCMS themselves should still issue a corrective, and soon.

The views in this post (and indeed all 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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August 7, 2017 · 7:19 am

DCMS Statement of Intent on the Data Protection Bill

Not so much a Statement of Intent, as a Statement of the Bleeding Obvious

The wait is not quite over. We don’t yet have a Data Protection Bill, but we do have a Statement of Intent from DCMS, explaining what the proposed legislation will contain. I though it would be helpful to do a short briefing note based on my very quick assessment of the Statement. So here it is

IT’S JUST AN ANNOUNCEMENT OF ALL THE THINGS THE UK WOULD HAVE TO IMPLEMENT ANYWAY UNDER EUROPEAN LAW

By which I mean, it proposes law changes which will be happening in May next year, when the General Data Protection Regulation becomes directly applicable, or changes made under our obligation to implement the Police and Crime Directive. In a little more detail, here are some things of passing interest, none of which is hugely unexpected.

As predicted by many, at page 8 it is announced that the UK will legislate to require parents to give consent to children’s access to information society services (i.e. online services) where the child is under 13 (rather than GDPR’s default 16). As the UK lobbied to give member states discretion on this, it is no surprise.

Exemptions from compliance with majority of data protection law when the processing is for the purposes of journalism will remain (page 19). The Statement says that the government

believe the existing exemptions set out in section 32 strike the right balance between privacy and freedom of expression

But of potential note is the suggestion that

The main difference will be to amend provisions relating to the ICO’s enforcement powers to strengthen the ICO’s ability to enforce the re-enacted section 32 exemptions effectively

Without further details it is impossible to know what will be proposed here, but any changes to the existing regime which might have the effect of decreasing the size of the media’s huge carve-out will no doubt be vigorously lobbied against.

There is confirmation (at pp17 and 18) that third parties (i.e. not just criminal justice bodies) will be able to access criminal conviction information. Again, this is not unexpected – the regime for criminal records checks for employers etc was unlikely to be removed.

The Statement proposes a new criminal offence of intentionally or recklessly re-identifying individuals from anonymised or pseudonymised data, something the Commons Science and Technology Committee has called for. Those who subsequently process such data will also be guilty of an offence. The details here will be interesting to see – as with most privacy-enhancing technology, in order for anonymisation to be robust it needs to stress-tested – such testing will not be effective if those undertaking do so at risk of committing an offence, so presumably the forthcoming Bill will provide for this.

The Bill will also introduce an offence of altering records with intent to prevent disclosure following a subject access request. This will use the current mechanism at section 77 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Whether that section itself will be amended (time limits for prosecutions militate against its effectiveness) remains unknown.

I also note that the existing offence of unlawfully obtaining personal data will be widened to those who retain personal data against the wishes of the data controller, even where it was initially obtained lawfully. This will probably cover those situations where people gather or are sent personal data in error, and then refuse to return it.

There is one particular howler at page 21, which suggests the government doesn’t understand what privacy by design and privacy by default mean:

The Bill will also set out to reassure citizens by promoting the concept of “privacy by default and design”. This is achieved by giving citizens the right to know when their personal data has been released in contravention of the data protection safeguards, and also by offering them a clearer right of redress

Privacy by design/default is about embedding privacy protection throughout the lifecycle of a project or process etc., and has got nothing at all to do with notifying data subjects of breaches, and whether this is a drafting error in the Statement, or a fundamental misunderstanding, it is rather concerning that the government, which makes much of “innovation” (around which privacy by design should be emphasised), fails to get this right.

So that’s a whistle stop tour of the Statement, ignoring all the fluff about implementing things which are required under GDPR and the Directive. I’ll update this piece in due course, if anything else emerges from a closer reading.

The views in this post (and indeed all 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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July 11, 2017 · 6:56 am

An enforcement gap?

ICO wants 200 more staff for GDPR , but its Board think there’s a risk it will instead be losing them

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is, without doubt, a major reconfiguring of European data protection law. And quite rightly, in the lead-up to its becoming fully applicable on 25 May next year, most organisations are considering how best they can comply with its obligations, and, where necessary, effecting changes to achieve that compliance. As altruistic as some organisations are, a major driver for most is the fear that, under GDPR, regulatory sanctions can be severe. Regulators (in the UK this is the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)) will retain powers to force organisations to do, or to stop, something (equivalent to an enforcement notice under our current Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA)), but they will also have the power to levy civil administrative fines of up to €20 million, or 4% of annual global turnover. Much media coverage has, understandably, if misleadingly, focused on these increased “fining” powers (the maximum monetary under the DPA is £500,000). I use the word “misleadingly”, because it is by no means clear that regulators will use the full fining powers available to them: GDPR provides regulators with many other options (see Article 58) and recital 129 in particular states that measures taken should be

appropriate, necessary and proportionate in view of ensuring compliance with this Regulation [emphasis added]

Commentators stressing the existence of these potentially huge administrative fines should be referred to these provisions of GDPR. 

But in the UK, at least, another factor has to be born in mind, and that is the regulator’s capacity to effectively enforce the law. In March this year, the Information Commissioner herself, Elizabeth Denham, told the House of Lords EU Home Affairs Sub-Committee that with the advent of GDPR she was going to need more resource

With the coming of the General Data Protection Regulation we will have more responsibilities, we will have new enforcement powers. So we are putting in new measures to be able to address our new regulatory powers…We have given the government an estimate that we will need a further 200 people in order to be able to do the job.

Those who rather breathlessly reported this with headlines such as “watchdog to hire hundreds more staff” seem to have forgotten the old parental adage of “I want doesn’t always get”. For instance, I want a case of ’47 Cheval Blanc delivered to my door by January Jones, but I’m not planning a domestic change programme around the possibility.

In fact, the statement by Denham might fall into a category best described as “aspirational”, or even “pie in the sky”, when one notes that the ICO Management Board recently received an item on corporate risk, the minutes from which state that

Concern was expressed about the risk of losing staff as GDPR implementation came closer. There remained a risk that the ICO might lose staff in large numbers, but to-date the greater risk was felt to be that the ICO could lose people in particular roles who, because of their experience, were especially hard to replace.

The ICO has long been based in the rather upmarket North West town of Wilmslow (the detailed and parochial walking directions from the railway station to the office have always rather amused me). There is going to be a limited pool of quality candidates there, and ICO pays poorly: current vacancies show case officers being recruited at starting salary of £19,527, and I strongly suspect case officers are the sort of extra staff Denham is looking at.

If ICO is worried about GDPR being a risk to staff retention (no doubt on the basis that better staff will get poached by higher paying employers, keen to have people on board with relevant regulatory experience), and apparently can’t pay a competitive wage, how on earth is it going to retain (or replace) them, and then recruit 200 more, from those sleepy Wilmslow recruitment fairs?

I write this blogpost, I should stress, not in order to mock or criticise Denham’s aspirations – she is absolutely right to want more staff, and to highlight the fact to Westminster. Rather, I write it because I agree with her, and because, unless someone stumps up some significant funding, I fear that the major privacy benefits that GDPR should bring for individuals (and the major sanctions against organisations for serious non-compliance) will not be realised.

The views in this post (and indeed all 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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July 10, 2017 · 9:14 pm

Making even more criminals

Norfolk Police want your dashcam footage. Do you feel lucky, punk?

I wrote recently about the change to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) registration process, which enables domestic users of CCTV to notify the ICO of that fact, and pay the requisite fee of £35. I noted that this meant that

it is the ICO’s apparent view that if you use CCTV in your household and capture footage outside the boundaries of your property, you are required to register this fact publicly with them, and pay a £35 fee. The clear implication, in fact the clear corollary, is that failure to do so is a criminal offence.

I didn’t take issue with the correctness of the legal position, but I went on to say that

The logical conclusion…here is that anyone who takes video footage anywhere outside their home must register

I even asked the ICO, via Twitter, whether users of dashcams should also register, to which I got the reply

If using dashcam to process personal data for purposes not covered by domestic exemption then would need to comply with [the Data Protection Act 1998]

This subject was moved from the theoretical to the real today, with news that Norfolk Constabulary are encouraging drivers using dashcams to send them footage of “driving offences witnessed by members of the public”.

Following the analyses of the courts, and the ICO, as laid out here and in my previous post, such usage cannot avail itself of the exemption from notification for processing of personal data “only” for domestic purposes, so one must conclude that drivers targeted by Norfolk Constabulary should notify, and pay a £35 fee.

At this rate, the whole of the nation would eventually notify. Fortunately (or not) the General Data Protection Regulation becomes directly applicable from May next year. It will remove the requirement to give notification of processing. Those wishing, then, to avoid the opprobrium of being a common criminal have ten months to send their fee to the ICO. Others might question how likely it is that the full force of the law will discover their criminality, and prosecute, in that short time period.

The views in this post (and indeed all 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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June 29, 2017 · 8:39 pm

Data Protection (and other) compensation awarded against Ombudsman

I’ve been helpfully referred to a rather remarkable judgment of the Leeds County Court, in a claim for damages against the Local Government Ombudsman for, variously, declaratory relief and damages arising from discrimination under the Equality Act 2010, and breach of the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA). The claim was resoundingly successful, and led to a total award of £12,500, £2,500 of which were aggravated damages because of the conduct of the trial by the respondent.

The judgment has been uploaded to Dropbox here.

I will leave readers to draw their own conclusions about the actions of the Ombudsman, but it’s worth noting, when one reads the trenchant criticism by District Judge Geddes, that one of the office’s strategic objectives is to

deliver effective redress through impartial, rigorous and proportionate investigations

One can only conclude that, in this case at least, this objective was very far from met.

Of particular relevance for this blog, though, was the award of £2500 for distress arising from failure to prepare and keep an accurate case file recording the disability of the claimant and her daughter. This, held the District Judge, was a contravention of the Ombudsman’s obligations under the DPA. As is now relatively well known, the DPA’s original drafting precluded compensation for distress alone (in the absence of tangible – e.g. financial – damage), but the Court of Appeal, in Vidal Hall & ors v Google ([2015] EWCA Civ 311), held that this was contrary to the provisions of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and that, accordingly, there was a right under the DPA to claim compensation for “pure” distress. The award in question here was of “Vidal Hall” compensation, with the judge saying there was

no doubt in my mind that the data breaches have caused distress to the claimant in their own rights as well as as a result of the consequences that flowed.

The views in this post (and indeed all 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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June 24, 2017 · 9:20 am

Making criminals of us all

The Information Commissioner thinks that countless households operating CCTV systems need to register this, and pay a £35 fee for doing so. If they don’t, they might be committing a crime. The Commissioner is probably mostly correct, but it’s a bit more complex than that, for reasons I’ll explain in this post.

Back in 2014, to the surprise of no one who had thought about the issues, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) held that use of domestic CCTV to capture footage of identifiable individuals in public areas could not attract the exemption at Article 3(2) of the European data protection directive for processing of personal data

by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity

Any use of CCTV, said the CJEU, for the protection of a house or its occupiers but which also captures people in a public space is thus subject to the remaining provisions of the directive:

the operation of a camera system, as a result of which a video recording of people is stored on a continuous recording device such as a hard disk drive, installed by an individual on his family home for the purposes of protecting the property, health and life of the home owners, but which also monitors a public space, does not amount to the processing of data in the course of a purely personal or household activity, for the purposes of that provision

As some commentators pointed out at the time, the effect of this ruling was potentially to place not just users of domestic CCTV systems under the ambit of data protection law, but also, say, car drivers using dashcams, cyclists using helmetcams, and many other people using image recording devices in public for anything but their own domestic purposes.

Under the directive, and the UK Data Protection Act 1998, any data controller processing personal data without an exemption (such as the one for purely personal or household activity) must register the fact with the relevant supervisory authority, which in the UK is the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). Failure to register in circumstances under which a data controller should register is a criminal offence punishable by a fine. There is a two-tier fee for making an entry in the ICO’s register, set at £35 for most data controllers, and £500 for larger ones.

For some time the ICO has advised corporate data controllers that if they use CCTV on their premises they will need to register:


But I recently noticed that the registration page itself had changed, and that there is now a separate button to register “household CCTV”


If one clicks that button one is taken to a page which informs that, indeed, a £35 fee is payable, and that the information provided will be published online 


There is a link to the ICO’s overarching privacy notice [ed. you’re going to have to tighten that up for GDPR, guys] but the only part of that notice which talks about the registration process relates only to “businesses”


Continuing the household CCTV registration process, one then gets to the main screen, which requires that the responsible person in the household identify themselves as data controller, and give either their household or email address for publication


What this all means is that it is the ICO’s apparent view that if you use CCTV in your household and capture footage outside the boundaries of your property, you are required to register this fact publicly with them, and pay a £35 fee. The clear implication, in fact the clear corollary, is that failure to do so is a criminal offence.

(In passing, there is a problem here: the pages and the process miss the point that for the registration to be required, the footage needs to be capturing images of identifiable individuals, otherwise no personal data is being processed, and data protection law is simply not engaged. What if someone has installed a “nest cam” in a nearby wooded area? Is ICO saying they are committing a criminal offence if they fail to register this? Also, what if the footage does capture identifiable individuals outside the boundaries of a household, but the footage is only taken for household, rather than crime reduction purposes? The logical conclusion of the ICO pages here is that anyone who takes video footage anywhere outside their home must register, which contradicts their guidance elsewhere.)

What I find particularly surprising about all this is that, although fundamentally it is correct as a matter of law (following the Ryneš decision by the CJEU), I have seen no publicity from the ICO about this pretty enormous policy change. Imagine how many households potentially *should* register, and how many won’t? And, therefore, how many the ICO is implying are committing a criminal offence?

And one thing that is really puzzling me is why this change, now? The CJEU ruling was thirty months ago, and in another eleven months, European data protection law will change, removing – in the UK also – the requirement to register in these circumstances. If it was so important for the ICO to effect these changes before then, why keep it quiet?

The views in this post (and indeed all 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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June 23, 2017 · 7:30 pm

Public houses, private comms

Wetherspoons delete their entire customer email database. Deliberately.

In a very interesting development, the pub chain JD Wetherspoon have announced that they are ceasing sending monthly newsletters by email, and are deleting their database of customer email addresses.

Although the only initial evidence of this was the screenshot of the email communication (above), the company have confirmed to me on their Twitter account that the email is genuine.

Wetherspoons say the reason for the deletion is that they feel that email marketing of this kind is “too intrusive”, and that, instead of communicating marketing by email, they will “continue to release news stories on [their] website” and customers will be able to keep up to date by following them on Facebook and Twitter.

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. Firstly, companies such as Flybe and Honda have recently discovered that an email marketing database can be a liability if it is not clear whether the customers in question have consented to receive marketing emails (which is a requirement under the Privacy and Electronic Communications ((EC Directive) Regulations 2003 (PECR)). In March Flybe received a monetary penalty of £70,000 from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) after sending more than 3.3 million emails with the title ‘Are your details correct?’ to people who had previously told them they didn’t want to receive marketing emails. These, said the ICO, were themselves marketing emails, and the sending of them was a serious contravention of PECR. Honda, less egregiously, sent 289,790 emails when they did not know whether or not the recipients had consented to receive marketing emails. This also, said ICO, was unlawful marketing, as the burden of proof was on Honda to show that they had recipients’ consent to send the emails, and they could not. The result was a £13,000 monetary penalty.

There is no reason to think Wetherspoons were concerned about the data quality (in terms of whether people had consented to marketing) of their own email marketing database, but it is clear from the Flybe and Honda cases that a bloated database with email details of people who have not consented to marketing (or where it is unclear whether they have) is potentially a liability under PECR (and related data protection law). It is a liability both because any marketing emails sent are likely to be unlawful (and potentially attract a monetary penalty) but also because, if it cannot be used for marketing, what purpose does it serve? If none, then it constitutes a huge amount of personal data, held for no ostensible purpose, which would be in contravention of the fifth principle in schedule 1 to the Data Protection Act 1998.

For this reason, I can understand why some companies might take a commercial and risk-based decision not to retain email databases – if something brings no value, and significant risk, then why keep it?

But there is another reason Wetherspoons’ rationale is interesting: they are clearly aiming now to use social media channels to market their products. Normally, one thinks of advertising on social media as not aimed at or delivered to individuals, but as technology has advanced, so has the ability for social media marketing to become increasingly targeted. In May this year it was announced that the ICO were undertaking “a wide assessment of the data-protection risks arising from the use of data analytics”. This was on the back of reports that adverts on Facebook were being targeted by political groups towards people on the basis of data scraped from Facebook and other social media. Although we don’t know what the outcome of this investigation by the ICO will be (and I understand some of the allegations are strongly denied by entities alleged to be involved) what it does show is that stopping your e-marketing on one channel won’t necessarily stop you having privacy and data protection challenges on another.

And that’s before we even get on to the small fact that European ePrivacy law is in the process of being rewritten. Watch that space.

The views in this post (and indeed all 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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February 10, 2017 · 5:33 pm

MPs have rights too

The Guardian reports on MPs’ concerns that IPSA’s proactive commitment to transparency is putting them at risk. Could those MPs use the Data Protection Act to stop IPSA publishing?

Anyone who has worked in the fields of Freedom of Information (FOI) and transparency will have come across colleagues or third parties who fear that one will simply disclose information, including personal information, into the public domain, without any thought. The reality is very different: FOI and transparency  professionals need to be expert not only in FOI law, but also other laws, such as breach of confidence, and, especially, the law of data protection: the FOI Act’s most cited exemption is at section 40(2), which provides an absolute exemption to disclosure where to do so would contravene someone’s rights under the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA).

With this in mind, and at least on the face of things, I have some sympathies with MPs concerned at proactive disclosure of details of mileage claims by IPSA (the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority). (Although the law requires candidates for parliamentary seats to declare their home address, as UKIP’s Paul Nuttall has recently been reminded, candidates can ask that the addresses not be made public.) The Guardian reports that the SNP’s Angus Robertson has ordered colleagues to stop submitting claims, because

data now required to make a claim for mileage, including the locations of journeys travelled to and from on a daily basis, was now being publicised [by IPSA]

Robertson says

Ipsa have been aware for some time that they are inadvertently confirming the home locations of parliamentarians, which runs contrary to basic security advice

Although IPSA appear to dispute that what is being published could locate specific properties, it is important to note that the expenses information being published is the personal data of the MPs involved. Therefore, any processing of it by IPSA must be in accordance with their obligations under the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA). The first data protection principle (in Schedule One of the DPA) requires that processing must be fair and lawful: if Robertson and others are right that there is a risk of disclosure of their home addresses (maybe by combining the IPSA data with other publicly available data), there is a strong argument that the processing is not fair.

So what can MPs do? Well, in addition to refusing to submit claims (which is rather cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face), the DPA offers a possible option. Section 10 allows a data subject to serve a notice in writing requiring a data controller to cease a specified act of processing, on the grounds that the processing is causing unwarranted substantial distress. Upon receipt of such a notice the data controller has twenty one days to respond, either by ceasing the processing, or stating why it considers the notice unjustified. At that point the data subject can ask a court to rule on whether the notice was justified, and order such steps as are appropriate.

Were an MP or MPs to serve such a notice, it might be difficult for IPSA to dispute the potential for substantial distress to be caused – if MPs reasonably fear that disclosure of their home addresses could occur (and it seems to me to be quite possible that they could – a location frequently travelled from at the start of a day, and to at the end of the day is quite likely to be a place of residence) then, given the horrendous murder of Jo Cox last year, and general ongoing security threats, I don’t think it would be surprising for such distress to be caused. And if the distress caused is real and substantial, could IPSA say it was warranted? I very much doubt it – the publication of this information is not necessary for the performance of IPSA’s core functions.

IPSA say that they have “consulted police” and feel that there is not a risk, although the Guardian suggests that both the Met and “senior security sources” have expressed concerns.

MPs’ expenses of course play an important part in the history of FOI in the UK, and some of the abuses of the system which were revealed when the requested information was leaked to the Telegraph were egregious (although it’s always worth remembering that were it not for the leak, a lot of the more gory details would probably not have emerged). But threats to MPs are real and serious, and one wonders why IPSA, even if it thinks the risk of identification of home addresses is low or even non-existent would not want to review the practice. A section 10 notice would, though, force the issue.

The views in this post (and indeed all 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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February 9, 2017 · 12:55 pm

Why what Which did wears my patience thin

Pre-ticked consent boxes and unsolicited emails from the Consumers’ Association

Which?, the brand name of the Consumers’ Association, publishes a monthly magazine. In an era of social media, and online reviews, its mix of consumer news and product ratings might seem rather old-fashioned, but it is still (according to its own figures1) Britain’s best-selling monthly magazine. Its rigidly paywalled website means that one must generally subscribe to get at the magazine’s contents. That’s fair enough (although after my grandmother died several years ago, we found piles of unread, unopened even, copies of Which? She had apparently signed up to a regular Direct Debit payment, probably to receive a “free gift”, and had never cancelled it: so one might draw one’s own conclusion about how many of Which?’s readers are regular subscribers for similar reasons).

In line with its general “locked-down” approach, Which?’s recent report into the sale of personal data was, except for snippets, not easy to access, but it got a fair bit of media coverage. Intrigued, I bit: I subscribed to the magazine. This post is not about the report, however, although the contents of the report drive the irony of what happened next.

As I went through the online sign-up process, I arrived at that familiar type of page where the subject of future marketing is broached. Which? had headlined their report “How your data could end up in the hands of scammers” so it struck me as amusing, but also irritating, that the marketing options section of the sign-in process came with a pre-ticked box:

img_0770

As guidance from the Information Commissioner’s Office makes clear, pre-ticked boxes are not a good way to get consent from someone to future marketing:

Some organisations provide pre-ticked opt-in boxes, and rely on the user to untick it if they don’t want to consent. In effect, this is more like an opt-out box, as it assumes consent unless the user clicks the box. A pre-ticked box will not automatically be enough to demonstrate consent, as it will be harder to show that the presence of the tick represents a positive, informed choice by the user.

The Article 29 Working Party goes further, saying in its opinion on unsolicited communications for marketing purposes that inferring consent to marketing from the use of pre-ticked boxes is not compatible with the data protection directive. By extension, therefore, any marketing subsequently sent on the basis of a pre-ticked box will be a contravention of the data protection directive (and, in the UK, the Data Protection Act 1998) and the ePrivacy directive (in the UK, the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 (PECR)).

Nothwithstanding this, I certainly did not want to consent to receive subsequent marketing, so, as well as making a smart-arse tweet, I unticked the box. However, to my consternation, if not my huge surprise, I have subsequently received several marketing emails from Which? They do not have my consent to send these, so they are manifestly in contravention of regulation 22 of PECR.

It’s not clear how this has happened. Could it be a deliberate tactic by Which?  to ignore subscribers’ wishes? One presumes not: Which? says it “exists to make individuals as powerful as the organisations they deal with in their daily live” – deliberately ignoring clear expressions regarding consent would hardly sit well with that mission statement. So is it a general website glitch – which means that those expressions are lost in the sign-up process? If so, how many individuals are affected? Or is it just a one-off glitch, affecting only me?

Let’s hope it’s the last. Because the ignoring or overriding of expressions of consent, and the use of pre-ticked boxes for gathering consent, are some of the key things which fuel trade in and disrespect for personal data. The fact that I’ve experience this issue with a charity which exists to represent consumers, as a result of my wish to read their report into misuse of personal data, is shoddy, to say the least.

I approached Which? for a comment, and a spokesman said:

We have noted all of your comments relating to new Which? members signing up, including correspondence received after sign-up, and we are considering these in relation to our process.

I appreciate the response, although I’m not sure it really addresses my concerns.

1Which? Annual Report 2015/2016

The views in this post (and indeed all 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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February 9, 2017 · 12:18 pm

Data Protection distress compensation for CCTV intrusion

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) recently (2 February) successfully prosecuted a business owner for operating CCTV without an appropriate notification under section 18 of the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA), announcing:

Businesses could face fines for ignoring CCTV data protection law

But a recent case in the Scottish Sheriff Court shows that CCTV and data protection can also have relevance in private law civil proceedings. In Woolley against Akbar [2017] ScotsSC 7 the husband and wife pursuers (equivalent to claimants in England and Wales) successfully brought a claim for compensation for distress caused by the defender’s (defendant in England and Wales) use of CCTV cameras which were continuously recording video and audio, and which were deliberately set to cover the pursuers’ private property (their garden area and the front of their home). Compensation was assessed at £8634 for each of the pursuers (so £17268 in total) with costs to be assessed at a later date.

Two things are of particular interest to data protection fans: firstly, the willingness of the court to rule unequivocally that CCTV operated in non-compliance with the DPA Schedule One principles was unlawful; and secondly, the award of compensation despite the absence of physical damage.

The facts were that Mr and Mrs Woolley own and occupy the upper storey of a dwelling place, while Mrs Akbar owns and operates the lower storey as a guest house, managed by her husband Mr Akram. In 2013 the relationship between the parties broke down. Although both parties have installed CCTV systems, the pursuers’ system only monitors their own property, but this was not the case with the defender’s:

any precautions to ensure that coverage of the pursuers’ property was minimised or avoided. The cameras to the front of the house record every person approaching the pursuers’ home. The cameras to the rear were set deliberately to record footage of the pursuers’ private garden area. There was no legitimate reason for the nature and extent of such video coverage. The nature and extent of the camera coverage were obvious to the pursuers, as they could see where the cameras were pointed. The coverage was highly intrusive…the defender also made audio recordings of the area around the pursuers’ property…they demonstrated an ability to pick up conversations well beyond the pursuers’ premises. There are four audio boxes. The rear audio boxes are capable of picking up private conversations in the pursuers’ rear garden. Mr Akram, on one occasion, taunted the pursuers about his ability to listen to them as the pursuers conversed in their garden. The defender and Mr Akram were aware of this at all times, and made no effort to minimise or avoid the said audio recording. The nature of the coverage was obvious to the pursuers. Two audio boxes were installed immediately below front bedroom windows. The pursuers feared that conversations inside their home could also be monitored. The said coverage was highly intrusive.

Although, after the intervention of the ICO, the defender realigned the camera at the rear of the property, Sheriff Ross held that the coverage “remains intrusive”. Fundamentally, the sheriff held that the CCTV use was: unfair (in breach of the first data protection principle); excessive in terms of the amount of data captured (in breach of the third data protection principle); and retained for too long (in breach of the fifth data protection principle).

The sheriff noted that, by section 13(2) of the DPA, compensation for distress can only be awarded if the pursuer has suffered “damage”, which was not the case here. However, the sheriff further correctly noted, and was no doubt taken to, the decision of the Court of Appeal in Vidal-Hall & Ors v Google [2015] EWCA Civ 311 in which the court struck down section 13(2) as being incompatible with the UK’s obligations under the European data protection directive and the Charter of Fundamental Rights (my take on Vidal Hall is here). Accordingly, “pure” distress compensation was available.

Although the facts here show a pretty egregious breach of DPA, it is good to see a court understanding and assessing the issues so well, no doubt assisted in doing so by Paul Motion, of BTO Solicitors, who appeared for the pursuers.

One niggle I do have is about the role of the ICO in all this: they were clearly apprised of the situation, and could surely have taken enforcement action to require the stopping of the CCTV (although admittedly ICO cannot make an award of compensation). It’s not clear to me why they didn’t.

The views in this post (and indeed all 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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