‘Data protection lawyers and specialists have long been used to their area of expertise being treated as a rather mould-infested and irritating area of the law, like champerty but with more Schedules. Amongst other things, Brexit seems to have caused a bit of an upsurge in interest in how cross-border data flows are going to be managed in the brave new world. (Panopticon has seen articles in the last few months mentioning the GDPR and data protection after Brexit in the LRB and Private Eye, which is a bit like unexpectedly finding your girlfriend on page 3 of the Sun and the New Left Review on the same day.) HM Government have also recognised the importance of the issue, and have today published their position paper entitled ‘The exchange and protection of personal data’.It is fair to say that the 15 pages that you print off are not ram-packed (to use Mr Corbyn’s famed train-based term) with unexpected surprises, or indeed a huge amount of detail. There will doubtless be complaints about this, but to be fair, what the UK would like from the EU in the data protection is hardly rocket science. It spends a good deal of space explaining the importance of ensuring good levels of data protection, and enabling cross-border data flows, whilst also making quite an effort to emphasise how keen the UK has been, and still is, on being at the forefront of data protection. It even suggests that the DPA 1998 implemented the Directive beyond the minimum required; perfectly fairly it points out that the DPA didn’t have to cover law enforcement data processing but chose to do so, and surely our European friends will not be so impolite as to note, for example, the need for the Court of Appeal to strike down bits of the DPA as not properly implementing the Directive in Vidal-Hall…’

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Panopticon, 24th August 2017

Source: panopticonblog.com