Data Protection

Price: £149.00 + VAT

For most people, the right to privacy is not only very important but an inviolate human right. This is not a new concept: as long ago as 1361, legislation in England contained provisions for dealing with eavesdroppers and peeping Toms.

But the modern, European privacy benchmark is contained in the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence”.

As the IT revolution gathered pace during the 1960s and 1970s, there was increasing concern about the storage of information on computers and the potential effect this could have on people’s privacy. As a result, in 1981 the Council of Europe published a convention on data protection. Any country that broke this convention could find it difficult to trade with Europe. It was this threat to trade that persuaded the British government to bring in the first UK Data Protection Act in 1984.

Almost a decade later, in 1995 the European Union issued a Directive on Data Protection. This Directive made it necessary to replace the existing UK legislation with a new Act, the Data Protection Act 1998.

It is mainly this piece of legislation that we consider in this module.