Access All Areas: Soft Skills For Handling DSARs

Chuck Palahniuk wrote that the only reason we ask other people about their weekend is so we can tell them about our own weekend. In that spirit, I had planned to switch off by watching sport and reading the newspapers. Perhaps you see what you want to see, but the weekend papers contained a couple of stories with a strong data protection connection that I couldn't help but think about more.

The first story concerned the UK Department for Education monitoring the social media activity of educational experts in England; the second story revealed that the British Labour Party had conducted a "lawfare" campaign to uncover embarrassing information about schools that have been critical of the Party's tax policy. Despite involving organisations on opposite sides of the political spectrum, the stories shared a common denominator: the use of data subject access requests (DSARs).