Welcome to Cripps’ fourth consultation response in this series of consultations regarding data protection law and GenAI.

This document focuses on data subject rights in the context of GenAI. Data subject rights are at the heart of everything we as data protection lawyers and practitioners do. The genesis of such rights go as far back as the Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights 1950 and feature heavily in the British Government’s work on data subject rights in the 1970’s. All of this tells us that these rights are really important, and really old. That helps us to appreciate just how important they are in the brand new context of GenAI.

The document as a whole is excellent, but I think this section in particular (in the answer to question one) does a good job of summarising our findings:

“We call on the ICO to ensure a robust approach is taken to protecting the rights of data subjects. This is not to stifle creativity and development, but to ensure the UK’s GenAI industry creates and deploys systems which are safe, ethical and trustworthy and to ensure the remarkable benefits of GenAI are not marred by risks and negative consequences.”

Unsurprisingly, the group’s findings were virtually unanimous on this topic. I would go so far as to say that, of the four consultations that we have undertaken, this one had the greatest (and easiest) consensus between the contributors.

To all the contributors: thank you once again. You are an amazing group of super-talented, highly-intelligent, dedicated professionals who willingly gave up your time to help shape this important area of public policy. And many of you did it around busy work schedules. Once again – thank you. Now we need the ICO to take note of all that you have, so wisely and sagely, articulated.

Kind regards Matthew