In today’s issue of the ICO’s blog series on “GDPR myths”, Deputy Commissioner Steve Wood addresses the fact that upcoming privacy regulations are only an evolution of long-standing principles. In the end, it boils down to six simple principles:
Many of the fundamentals remain the same and have been known about for a long time. Fairness, transparency, accuracy, security, minimisation and respect for the rights of the individual whose data you want to process – these are all things you should already be doing with data and GDPR seeks only to build on those principles.
And indeed - the intricacies of the GDPR’s details aside, and with full awareness of the headaches its implementation is causing - when looking at it from a common sense perspective, we end up with six very simple rules that can guide the design of privacy-aware (and compliant) solutions that process individuals’ data:
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Fairness
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Transparency
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Accuracy
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Security
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Minimisation
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Respect
Regulation or not - these are values that every user should be able to expect in the first place.