VIDEO: Excellence through Ethics

SYNOPSIS
Ellis Parry’s role at the ICO is focussed on the interplay between data ethics and the core Principles of the GDPR.

Ellis emphasises that data ethics ensures that we ask ourselves the key question "should we be doing this?", as opposed to just thinking in technical and legal terms whether something could or can be done. The benefits of an ethical approach are illustrated through the story of how the UK’s Covid-19 tracing system pivoted from a centralised model to a much more privacy-friendly decentralised system – “a real example of the need to think through things at the beginning to get data protection right, avoiding delays and avoiding wasted money.” More positively, a telecoms company used a “Human Impact Assessment” to ensure that a geo-location system was limited to anonymised and aggregated data.

KEY POINT
Data Ethics provides a holistic way of discharging all obligations under data protection legislation.

BIO
Ellis Parry was appointed in November 2019 as the Information Commissioner’s first Data Ethics Adviser, responsible for articulating the regulator’s view of the interplay between the inherently ethical principles of the GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 and the growing field of data ethics. Prior to this Ellis was the Global Lead for Data Privacy at BP, responsible for maintaining its Binding Corporate Rules and designing its GDPR global change programme, and before that Ellis was Global Privacy Counsel at the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca where negotiating the relationship between medical research ethics and the data protection principles was a regular and constant feature of his practice.