The UK GDPA article 17 right to erasure. Can I retain the person&#39;s ID number if it no longer identifies them? I manage a small relational database for members of a club with about 600 members. The 'member' table has records holding the memberID , their name, address phone etc. The memberID is then used as a key into in other tables, such as the 'club_officers' table that hold the dates when someone with a particular memberID held certain positions in the club. Under the 'right to erasure', if I delete all the personally identifiable data (name, address, phone etc) from the 'member' table, would I be able to retain the memberID in that table, associated with just a load of blank fields, so that I can still link it to other tables? That way I would still be able to see that, for example, somebody with memberID 1234 was the club secretary between 2012 and 2014, which would be useful. However, since nowhere in my database does that memberID 1234 provide any name, address phone etc. I cannot identify who that person was. Is this sufficient for this part of article 17?
The GDPR has a fairly broad concept of personal data: any information that relates to an identifiable person. This is far more than directly identifiable information! The concept of identifiability is further explained in Recital 26: To determine whether a natural person is identifiable, account should be taken of all the means reasonably likely to be used, such as singling out, either by the controller or by another person to identify the natural person directly or indirectly. So indirectly linkable information can still be personal data. In your example, that ID can be easily re-identified with a particular person if you know who the secretary was between 2012 and 2014. It is quite likely that there are members in the club with this knowledge, or that this information can be gained from public sources like newspaper reports. Thus, you should assume that your member IDs are at most pseudonyms, but not anonymous. They are likely still personal data. However, it doesn't necessarily follow that you would have to erase everything. Art 17 comes with lots of caveats and exceptions. For example, if you are processing this personal data under a legitimate interest, and someone requests erasure, you might have overriding grounds to continue processing anyway. E.g. such a legitimate interest could involve security or auditability purposes. There might also be such a legitimate interest for keeping some history for the club, but there would have to be a decision based on the individual circumstances. Furthermore, you can of course retain data e.g. due to a legal obligation, or when this information is necessary for the establishment of or defence against legal claims. I understand your desire to keep some data around. Instead of asking “do I have to delete this?” it might be more productive to consider “under which legal basis can I keep this?”. I think you might have a legitimate interest, but you'd have to carry out a balancing test between the various interests and rights. A really problematic approach would be to hold on to de-identified data in the belief that it no longer were personal data. Such a belief is usually mistaken. True anonymization that meets the GDPR's definition is really hard, in particular because you would also have to prevent indirect identification, also by other actors than yourself. There are theoretical models that can help with anonymization, e.g. with k-anonymization methods you'd ensure that there are no unique records in the DB. But this can be tricky to apply correctly, so I'd recommend to only treat aggregate statistics as truly anonymous. In 2012, the ICO has published an anonymization code of practice (PDF). It is no longer up to date with the current legal environment (in particular since the GDPR has expanded the concept of identifiability), but it provides a good overview of both the difficulties of preventing re-identification and an overview of potential solutions.
Yes. Article 4 GDPR Definitions (1) ‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person; Recital 26 Not applicable to anonymous data The principles of data protection should apply to any information concerning an identified or identifiable natural person. Personal data which have undergone pseudonymisation, which could be attributed to a natural person by the use of additional information should be considered to be information on an identifiable natural person. To determine whether a natural person is identifiable, account should be taken of all the means reasonably likely to be used, such as singling out, either by the controller or by another person to identify the natural person directly or indirectly. To ascertain whether means are reasonably likely to be used to identify the natural person, account should be taken of all objective factors, such as the costs of and the amount of time required for identification, taking into consideration the available technology at the time of the processing and technological developments. The principles of data protection should therefore not apply to anonymous information, namely information which does not relate to an identified or identifiable natural person or to personal data rendered anonymous in such a manner that the data subject is not or no longer identifiable. This Regulation does not therefore concern the processing of such anonymous information, including for statistical or research purposes.
The GDPR applies to such sites if they offer services in the EU/EEA. If they clearly wanted to avoid being subject to the GDPR, they should block visitors from the EEA. For the GDPR, only location matters. Other concerns like residence or citizenship are generally irrelevant. Personal data does not turn non-personal just because it was public. So the GDPR still applies when the data was collected from public sources. However, the data controller (who determines the purpose of processing) often has to balance your rights and interests against other interests (e.g. when using legitimate interest as a legal basis for some processing). For the purpose of publicly displaying your data, only showing data that was already public anyway makes it easier to argue that this is fine. But when the GDPR applies, you have data subject rights. Relevant rights include: a right to access, to see all the data they have about you a right to rectification, to correct wrong data they hold about you a right to restriction, effectively an opt-out a right to erasure (also known as the right to be forgotten) These rights apply both against the website and against Google Search (arguably, both are doing the exact same thing). Google correctly points out that they can't remove information from the Web, but they can hide information from search results. If you feel that your requests have not been resolved correctly, you can issue a complaint with your country's data protection authority. In theory you can also sue them. In practice, GDPR enforcement against overseas data controllers can be quite difficult and has not yet happened.
This will depend partly on what you use the e-commerce website for. If it is simply a point-of-sales and your accounting records are kept elsewhere, then it may be possible to delete their account including associated orders and payments, though you should check that the software doesn't simply update the record by setting the value for a column named deleted or del for short to 1 instead of 0 to identify deleted records, but instead actually deletes the record from the database. You should consider how you will refund a customer if required after doing so!! (i.e. perhaps you acknowledge the request but keep the information for at least as long as the customer is eligible for a refund, and then delete it). If the system is also used for accounting records, then if a customer/user wishes to assert their right to be forgotten, it is likely you'll need to disable the account and apply some kind of pseudonymisation (essentially replacing personal identifiers such as name, email address, date-of-birth, with dummy/null data), in order to preserve the integrity of your financial records. For example, in the UK, there is a statutory obligation on companies to retain financial records for at 7 years. In cases where data cannot be immediately erased due to other legitimate reasons for which it must be kept, once those retention periods expire the data must be erased. You'll need to keep a record of anyone that requests to be forgotten, and remember to follow-up to complete erasure at the appropriate dates if it can't be done immediately, and when the data is destroyed the user needs to be informed.
The GDPR does not prescribe how information should be pseudonymized and does not even define the term properly. Yet, pseudonymization is suggested as an safety measure in various places, so that pseudonymization should be implemented wherever appropriate. The most useful guidance the GDPR gives is by contrasting pseudonymization with anonymization, where it says that pseudonymized data is still personal data because the data subjects can be identified using additional information (see Recital 26 GDPR). In contrast, re-identification is not reasonably likely for truly anonymized data. A common technique for pseudonymization is to replace identifying information with a pseudonym, for example replacing a name with a random numeric ID. However, this can only be considered pseudonymous if the mapping between the ID and the real value is not available to whoever uses this data. Replacing individual fields in a data set might not be sufficient for pseudonymization because apparently non-sensitive fields could still enable indirect identification. This requires careful analysis taking into account the entire context of the data, so it isn't possible to say whether merely removing names + email addresses achieves pseudonymization or anonymization. What you are doing is redacting parts of sensitive data. I think this is a pretty weak pseudonymization method since it still leaks partial information about the true value, and leaks information about the length of the redacted value. It is possible to argue that this is OK (e.g. if you can show that you have multiple similar redactions so that you achieve a level of k-anonymity). But by default, such partial redactions are likely to be unsafe. Completely removing the sensitive data is much safer. The “Article 29 Working Party”, a pre-GDPR EU body, has published an opinion on anonymization techniques in 2014 (PDF). It does not account for the GDPR's specific phrasing, but provides an overview of pseudonymization and anonymization techniques and puts them into context of European data protection law. It considers how such guarantees guard against attacks such as singling out data subjects, linking multiple records of the same individual, and making inferences about the data subject. In this guidance, pseudonymization techniques that are suggested include encrypting or hashing the sensitive data. However, the guidance warns that such techniques do not provide strong protection against singling out or linking records of the data subject. A bit earlier, the UK ICO had published guidance on personal data, including on the matter of anonymization and pseudonymization (PDF) with some good examples. For determining whether a data set has been successfully anonymized (or pseudonymized), they suggest a motivated intruder test: could someone without specialist knowledge or skills re-identify the data subject? In your example, such a person should not be able to infer that a record about Stxxx Axxdxrxn is about a Steve Anderson. In my opinion, your pseudonymization approach would fail the motivated intruder test unless you have multiple records that could all be about Steve Anderson (compare k-anonymity).
Yes, it triggers the GDPR obligations Considerations: Can you surely identify those residing in Europe? In that case you should ask them to sign up again and confirm the consent. A lot of mailing lists are doing just that. Did they previously give consent and you can document it? If so, then you can argue that you have the required consent. Do you have business in Europe? If not then I don't think they would bother to go after you. You could just walk away from the fine. What other personal informastion are you storing? If you know who reside in Europe then you already have more info than just the email. The email address itself wouldn't be much of a documentation issue, SAR or Portability task.
Yes, their waiver has no legal basis and is invalid under the GDPR. They should have hired a better lawyer. GDPR rights cannot be waived (mrllp.com). The last bit should have been: Therefore, in consideration of my participation in any project, I understand that retaining my name and email address, as described above, does not require my consent and that the right of erasure, as spelled out in the GDRP Article 17 (1) b does not apply. The legal basis for our lawful processing of this personal data is Article 6 (1) f ("processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the controller"). I.e. there is nothing in the GDPR that compels GitLab to erase this information, but their waiver is bogus. Keeping track of individual contributions in a software projects is necessary for a number of reasons, including security (if somebody contributes code that jeopardizes security, you want to audit everything that person has contributed).
The GDPR allows the right to access to be limited if this access would “adversely affect the rights and freedoms of others” (Art 15(4) GDPR). However, access to the recording would not give you more information than you've already received during the phone call, so this exemption is quite unlikely to apply in any case. UK data protection law also has a large list of additional exceptions, as summarized here by ICO guidance. These exemptions also cover some aspects of trade secrets, and even mention insurance examples. However, not such exemption is likely to apply in your case: the recording would not give you more information than you already have. If the data controller is concerned about some parts of the conversation, they should provide a redacted copy and explain why the redactions were performed. They should not reject the request outright. If the data controller wants to reject the request entirely, they must do so within the time frame for the DSAR (one month), must explain their reasons, and must inform you that you're allowed to lodge a complaint with your supervisory authority or to sue them. However, ICO guidance is flexible on how detailed the reason for refusal can be: Where an exemption applies, the reasons you give to an individual for not complying with a request may depend upon the particular case. For example, if telling an individual that you have applied a particular exemption would prejudice the purpose of that exemption, your response may be more general. However, where possible, you should be transparent about your reasons for withholding information. Here, I don't see any reason why full transparency would be a problem, so I would expect that the data controller can point to a specific exemption in UK data protection law. If you are unsatisfied with the data controller's response, please consider lodging a complaint with the supervisory authority. In the UK, this is the ICO. On the ICO complaints page, you can fill out the online form about “your personal information concerns”.