Author: info@amberhawk.com

The Home Office’s (very truncated) consultation on a revised Code of Practice involving overt surveillance of public places (e.g. the use of facial recognition CCTV, Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR)) ends in early September. In summary, the draft Code contains too many general platitudes for my liking and is deficient on important detail.  So much so, one wonders whether the Home Office is taking this public consultation seriously. The two main deficiencies are: omission of key elements of the UK_GDPR

I have just spent hours drafting a letter for our hard-pressed Information Commissioner (IC) to send to the Secretary of State at the DCMS (Oliver Dowden).  It reads: “Dear Ollie.  Sod off. I’m independent.  Lots of love.  Lizzie”. Of course such a letter won’t be sent, but it should be.  The reason: there have now have been three attempts (at least) where the independence of the current or future IC is under attack by Ministers. The problem is that Government

Today’s Sunday Telegraph reports, on its front page, that the UK Government is sympathetic to the idea that Judgments made by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg do not automatically apply in the UK.   If such non-application occurred, then it would jeopardise the Adequacy Agreement concerning personal data flows from the EU to the UK, as finalised by the European Commission last Friday. Why is the UK deemed adequate? Recital 5 to the Agreement states “that the

Yesterday, the Taskforce on Innovation, Growth and Regulatory Reform (TIGRR) reported to the Prime Minister on how the UK could, in general,  reshape its approach to regulation and seize new opportunities from Brexit with its newfound regulatory freedom.  Unsurprisingly, changes to the UK_GDPR are high on TIGRR’s list. In summary, under the heading “Replace GDPR with a new UK framework for data protection”,  perhaps with a “UK Framework for Citizen Data Rights”, TIGRR propose:  a Common Law approach towards enforcement;

Like many, I did not know about the Ministerial Directions that require NHS Digital to create a national database of GP medical records until the indefatigable “Med Confidentiality” NGO raised its profile.  In this blog, I will make some comments about data protection safeguards, most of them statutory,  which appear to me to be missing. NHS Digital, at the behest of the Secretary of State for Health, has been given Directions to take copies of medical records from all GP surgeries in

The Court of Appeal’s conclusion that the ‘Immigration Exemption’ in Schedule 2 to the DPA 2018 is not compliant with the GDPR creates two data protection headaches for Government. First, the Court’s method of determining the illegality of the immigration exemption (i.e. that the safeguards in Article 23(2) of the GDPR were missing from the UK’s DPA2018),  applies to ALL exemptions in Schedules 2 to 5.  So does this mean ALL exemptions in the DPA2018 are equally unlawful? Second, if

When I posted the blog on the return of the database state via the National Fraud Initiative (NFI), I knew I was going out on a limb.  Afterall, if one criticises a key Government initiative for being incredibly invasive of privacy, one hardly expects to be awarded two or three “back-of-the-hand” COVID contracts as a “thank you”. So it is a relief that the ICO’s response to NFI consultation on data matching (just published) has come to similar conclusions (see