‘Data protection is not just about organisations and fines’
A GREATER emphasis on people rather than fines and organisations is something that Bailiwick data protection commissioner Emma Martins is hoping to see emerge from its new four-year strategy, which has just been launched.
While it has a lot in common with the previous strategy, published soon after the founding of the Office of the Data Protection Authority in 2018, Mrs Martins said it was important to take stock of what the organisation had done and how it could learn from that. ‘I don’t think you can have a strategy ad infinitum,' she said.
‘I think that a lot of it is the same for a reason. It’s not laziness, and it’s not expediency, it’s simply that what we envisaged to be meaningful, effective, community-led regulation to get good outcomes as opposed to simply issue big fines, has, we think, worked really well.’
So while much of it is familiar, she said that was a good thing.
‘That means that there’s been no significant shift in the course that we set, because a regulated community needs consistency – consistency in our approach and need consistency in what is an increasingly complex area for them with so much data.'
One thing she would like to do is to move the conversation to thinking about what the data protection law was for, rather than just being about fines and companies.
‘It’s for individuals. It’s to prevent harm to individuals and sometimes conversations do not even mention people. They talk about cyber and they talk about hackers. What about the person at the centre of it?’
As part of this, the imagery of the strategic plan focuses on people rather than the typical illustrations that might come up in an online search, such as padlocks, ones and zeroes.
‘That’s not data protection. That’s an element of it, but data protection is you, it’s me, it’s your colleagues, it’s your family, and we need to get better at trying to shift the conversation.’
This will be Mrs Martins’ last year in the position of commissioner and she said that she was proud of the reputation that she hoped the ODPA had earned during her time at the helm. ‘But it’s not one person’s endeavour,’ she said.
It stemmed from the Bailiwick committing to building an office that would be ‘fit for purpose for this extraordinarily data-driven world that we now find ourselves in. And the jurisdiction has done that. So I’m one small part of a bigger puzzle.’
She said the best thing to do in looking to the future was to learn from what had happened in the past and to try to reduce or even eliminate some of the risks.
