By Elena Siniscalco
[Re: Donelan’s data law reform lag raises eyebrows, Oct 4]
The announcement this week by culture secretary Michelle Donelan that the UK plans to replace GDPR with its own “business and consumer-friendly British data protection system” is bad news. It will only increase complexity for companies in Britain and the EU hoping to collaborate by sharing data across geographical boundaries.
Companies will now have to find a new way to collaborate on data while ensuring privacy and regulatory compliance. Federated data ecosystems – which allow collaboration without the data leaving organisational and geographical boundaries – are the most pressing response to the problem of working across organisational and geographical boundaries. Through them, personal data never leaves its secure environment. That means it can be easily mapped to different privacy laws.
If we fail to provide companies with a way to continue collaborating, we risk causing a further widening of the division between EU and British businesses. We desperately need to double down on collaboration to leverage the significant growth in technologies such as AI and the major societal challenges we are facing head-on from sustainability to drug discovery. Limiting the access to data sets that these technologies run on with yet another set of rules for the UK is a step in the wrong direction.
Robin Röhm
CEO and co-founder of Apheris
The post Letters: A GDPR Brexit won’t help us appeared first on CityAM.
