Amanda House, Data Protection and Rights Clearance Officer for Unlocking Our Sound Heritage reflects on how the new data protection regulation will impact the sharing of audio archives online.

GDPR is a new regulation designed to strengthen and combine the existing protection provided by the Data Protection Act (1998) for all individuals within the European Union, replacing the 1995 Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC on which the UK Data Protection Act 1998 was based.

The primary aim of GDPR is to protect EU citizens from privacy and data breaches in an increasingly data-driven world. The UK Parliament is currently in the process of passing a bill that will ensure this protection will remain when the UK leaves the EU next year.

Data Protection law is designed to safeguard the privacy of identifiable living individuals and to protect them from substantial damage or distress in the processing of their personal data and sensitive personal data. The updated regulation includes harsher fines for non-compliance and breaches, and gives people more say in how their data is used.

As part of Unlocking Our Sound Heritage, the British Library and 10 partner organisations are digitally preserving some of the most at risk audio recordings and sharing them with as many people as possible. Over the next few years we will be publishing 100,000 recordings online, some of these may contain the personal and sensitive personal information of identifiable living individuals. Since many of the recordings are unpublished or broadcast we need to be especially careful to review the material before putting it online.

Article 89 of GDPR allows for ‘archiving in the public interest’ and Article 6(1)(e) allows for processing that is ‘necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest’. This gives archives the permission to publish more material than a first reading of the new law might suggest.  Personal data in a recording is not, on its own, a reason to not share it online.  For the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project all the recordings will be assessed for data protection and sensitivity.  As long as the personal data is not likely to cause substantial damage or distress to a living individual we won’t redact or exclude the recording.  Of course, as well as complying with GDPR, we need make a number of other legal considerations  such as copyright and libel before making recordings available. However that is a topic for another blog!

For more information on how the British Library deals with personal information see the updated British Library Privacy Policy.

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