To say that anything connected with GDPR is the worst example of its kind is a foolhardy business. I’ve read so many terrible articles, LinkedIn posts and Tweets about GDPR, to single any one of them out and say ‘THIS ONE IS THE WORST’ seems pointless. Most of them are bad. However, after watching 33 minutes of waffle, padding and gleefully misinformed bullshit, I am reckless enough to say that the intellectual property lawyer Dai Davis’ talk here is the worst presentation or talk I have seen about the GDPR in any format.
Admittedly, the trainer in me hated it because of the incompetence – Davis has to keep going back to the podium to change slides because he hasn’t brought a remote, and he pads the talk out with protracted questions to the audience that don’t add anything to what he is saying. When someone intelligent-sounding in the audience takes him on by asking a proper question, he runs a mile.
More seriously, a good chunk of the talk is taken up with an attempt to create a formula for how much you should spend on data protection compliance based on the likelihood of being fined. It’s an eye-catching and controversial thing to throw out in a conference, but I don’t believe even Davis knows what point he’s making. Is he really saying that a every organisation should spend a meaningless, averaged-out €2000 to comply with GDPR, or is that just a flourish? Every organisation is different to another, and will have radically different priorities and appetites for risk, so trying to create a standardised methodology is so random and unhelpful, I don’t think it’s a serious point. Given the number of basic mistakes and baseless assertions he makes in such a short time, however, the only thing I can add to his calculations is that however much you spend on GDPR, you should probably not spend it on advice from him.
I may not have got them all, but here is as full a collection of all the blunders as I could manage:
- Davis cannot remember how many deputies the Commissioner has, but he knows that it’s between 11 and 13. There are 3 deputies (James Dipple-Johnstone, Paul Arnold and Steve Wood); there have never been more than 3.
- Davis consistently gets the name of the ICO wrong – it’s almost always the ‘Information Commission Office’, although he varies it at least once with ‘Information Commission Data Protection Officer’ (he wasn’t talking about their DPO). To be charitable, it might be because he’s talking quickly, but the errors are relentless. He clearly thinks that Elizabeth Denham’s job title is ‘ICO’. because he calls her this repeatedly, and talks about what he would do if he was “the ICO“.
- He asserts that the GDPR is not a ‘step change’ from the old legislation solely because it has lots of words, even though many of those words are very similar to words in the same order in the old version
- He notes that there has not been a GDPR fine yet. Davis was speaking on May 30th, two days after the first 72 hours to *report* a relevant breach would have elapsed.
- He asserts several times that in theory “every single breach” has to be reported to the ICO. This is completely false. There is a specific definition of a breach in the GDPR and incidents that do not meet a certain threshold of risk do not have to be reported.
- He says that telecoms companies had to report breaches to the ICO since 2012. Communications providers have had this duty since 2011, not just telecoms companies.
- Davis claims that public sector bodies self-report breaches to the ICO because they have no idea about how to take a commercial risk. There is the problem that public sector bodies are not commercial organisations by and large, so that argument makes no sense, but it’s also factually incorrect. To take one example, NHS bodies (the example shouted out by an audience member) have been obliged by the operation of the Information Governance Toolkit to report breaches to the ICO since at least 1st June 2013 (I think it was actually earlier than this, but that’s the one given in a Toolkit document that Davis could have found with a single Google search if facts were something he had any curiosity about).
- Davis claims that the ICO is not really responsible for prosecutions for S55 offences, despite talking exclusively about prosecutions that the ICO carried out.
- He includes the prosecutions in his calculations for the risk of being fined by the ICO, seemingly unaware that fines and prosecutions are two entirely distinct activities, with S55 prosecutions being against individuals rather than organisations. Throughout, Davis talks about the ICO enforcing on ‘people’, so I don’t know if he knows that the penalties were issued against data controllers.
- He says that there were 18000 complaints in 2016 and the ICO has done nothing about nearly all of them. As someone who thinks the ICO is crap, even I have to acknowledge that most of these complaints were resolved informally and the absence of a fine does not mean that nothing happened. In quite a few cases, the complaint would not have been valid, and so no action would be appropriate.
- He twice says that the maximum penalty for a breach under the DPA 1998 was £5,000,000; it was £500,000.
- He quotes the head of the ICO’s ‘Breach Notification Division’, which does not exist.
- He claims that the GDPR contains more loopholes that requires the ICO to hire criminal lawyers. The standard of evidence for a GDPR breach is balance of probabilities, and GDPR removes the requirement to prove damage or distress for a monetary penalty.
- He says the ICO has 700 staff – they haven’t recruited these staff yet.
- He tells a story of how he tells his hotel clients (who, if they exist, have my pity) that they cannot claim to be GDPR compliant because they use “mobile telephones” and allow their staff to send text messages. According to Davis, it is impossible to use mobile phones securely.
At the point where Davis says “smart lawyers like me“, my jaw did not drop, it fell off.
Leaving aside how garbled and smug Davis’ performance is, you might wish to charitable and take on his central thesis – that you probably won’t get a GDPR fine. He’s right. There have been relatively few penalties under Data Protection thus far and so the risk of getting one is relatively small. I cannot disagree with this banal point because I have made it myself any times. However, I can’t tell if his conclusion is simply that nobody should bother complying or whether there would have been a ‘however, you should comply because…’ moment, because there isn’t a conclusion. Presumably because he has run out of time, Davis just stops. So what, Dai? What’s your point? What should the audience do with this information? Should they just ignore GDPR? There’s definitely a sense of this when he says that 10 years from now, the owner of a B&B will not know what GDPR is.
If Davis had the guts or the discipline to get to a conclusion that GDPR doesn’t matter, that would have been something. His contempt for detail would still be an impediment, but ‘Ignore GDPR’ is an assertion worth tackling. I could counter by arguing that the threat of a fine isn’t a good reason to comply, but respecting human dignity and avoiding harm to real people though inaccuracy, intrusion and insecurity is, but Davis never stops circling the airport, so I don’t even know if that’s what he’s saying.
If his contention that organisations don’t have the ability to measure risk effectively and need to get GDPR in perspective, that’s actually a good point, but he makes it so incompetently that again I’m not motivated to take him on. I have grudging sympathy for the idea that reputational damage is an overhyped risk (again, it’s not a point he makes clearly), but I know that many in the Data Protection world would passionately disagree, and I suspect that they could use Facebook’s current woes as evidence that public perception over data misuse isn’t something that boardrooms can ignore.
In the end, I think Davis is a clever man pontificating about a subject he neither cares for or understands, but the danger is that people will watch the talk and be contaminated by it. You could argue that I am making it worse by drawing attention to it solely so I can take the piss. All I can say is, the talk is out there. People will see it. As this is the case, if you find his argument (such as it is) attractive, it’s worth pointing out how sloppy and ill-informed his thinking is. It’s worth asking if this is the ‘Ignore GDPR’ guy, why would you listen to him?
