Data protection law – the bundle of statutory duties on
those who handle personal data about individuals and the
corresponding rights for the individuals concerned – sits
plumb in the centre of data law, an increasingly broad and complex
amalgam of contract law, intellectual property and regulation.
An important area of looming challenge for data protection
lawyers at the moment is Big Data, the aggregation and analysis of
datasets of great volume, variety and velocity for the purpose of
competitive advantage1, where the business world is just
at the start of a period of rapid adoption.
On 28 July 2014, the Information Commissioner's Office
(ICO) published a paper on Big Data and Data
Protection2. Unsurprisingly, the paper's main themes
are that Big Data's complexity is no reason not to apply data
protection law, and that that the Data Protection Act 1998
(DPA) is fundamentally fit for purpose when it
comes to Big Data. In applying the DPA's principles to
