What does the future look like for UK-EU data movement?

According to a new paper published by the government, the UK will seek “new arrangements” with the EU “in order to allow for the continued free flow of personal data”.

However, this may be scuppered by the Investigatory Powers Act, which has previously been dubbed a “security nightmare” by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and is not mentioned in the paper. In addition, the UK will be leaving the EU-US Privacy Shield — potentially meaning that data could “be transferred to the US without EU-worthy oversights”.

Furthering the announcement of the new Data Protection Act and discussion around the proposal to criminalise data re-identification, Danvers Baillieu points out that the actual criminal act should be the releasing of badly anonymised data. In order to keep strengthening systems, it is VITAL that researchers are given a white hat exception:

The protection of whistleblowers should go further and the government should implement a notification system to the ICO so that researchers can easily receive advance clearance for re-identification projects and be shielded from the risk of prosecution.

Highly recommend reading the full article (shorter version in CityAM).