The Data Protection and Digital Information Bill has failed to complete its legislative passage in the necessary time frame before the General Election. It is understood that late amendments added by the Department of Work and Pensions are what caused the Bill to fail. The amendments facilitated data sharing between the Department and private companies, mainly banks, with the aim to prevent fraud.
The DPDI Bill proposed to take away some of the controls set out in the DPA 2018. The Bill’s controversial proposals included:
- Creating powers to monitor the bank accounts and financial assets of anyone who receives any benefits or state pension
- Making it harder to access data by giving organisations more powers to refuse requests
- Increasing automated decision-making
- Expanding exemptions for data sharing, use and reuse
- Removing the need to carry out data protection impact assessments (DPIA)
- Creating new powers to approve international data transfers
- Threatening the UK-EU adequacy agreement, which enables data sharing between the UK and the EU
Actions:
Be aware of potential introduction of a new DPDI Bill following the general election
Source Demise of the DPDI is good news for data protection in the UK | Open Rights Group
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