Hide or Speak?

Here lies a Public Record of one Privacy Professional and Data Protection Officer’s Evidence to the United Kingdom Parliament’s Scrutiny Committee in 2023, when they were discussing the virtues and vices of the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill (2nd version).

Originally presented, for the most part, as a series of articles on LinkedIn, although also including a number of emails to the Scrutiny Committee and an ExecutiveSummary, this book seeks to demonstrate how bad the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill (should it ever become Law), will be in terms of:
1) Destruction of Your Rights and the erection of what may be impenetrable barriers to getting Your Rights considered appropriately, let alone upheld.

2) Other Associated (but less recognised) Harms that go hand-in-hand with undermining Your Data Protection Rights and wider Privacy Rights.

3) Other (highly likely, in the author’s view) Issues that the Bill may cause to Businesses and those Organisations that provide a Public Service, including
reputational damage, loss of Public Trust and even a number of elements that may harm the United Kingdom’s Economy.

4) A Better Alternative – a better strategy and a better way of doing things – The author proposes her own National Data Protection Strategy, with Pillars and Missions and practical steps to take, to show what good could and arguably should look like.

5) Things that could be done, here and now to achieve the United Kingdom Government’s aims (or at least some of them) that can be done without imposing the Bill onto the UK Public.

Additional material has been added in this book, to further enlighten the reader about pertinent issues, background facts and related topics – this has mostly been achieved through a number of screenshots as well as additional footnotes and the additional information contained within the Glossary.