Accept All: Unacceptable? Tracking the experience of trying to reclaim personal data – and what government, businesses and citizens can learn from it

Time and again, we see technology getting ahead of privacy – and citizens being caught in the crossfire. These speak to an unsustainable status quo – but where are the weak points in how we protect data currently, and how can we forge a different path to protect data rights?

Accept All: Unacceptable?, researched and published in collaboration with our research partners partners, law firm Schillings and the independent consumer data action service Rightly, sought to investigate how our data footprints are being created and exploited online. It involved an exploratory investigation into how data sharing and data regulation practices are impacting citizens: looking into how individuals’ data footprints are created, what people experience when they want to exercise their data rights, and how they feel about how their data is being used. This was a novel approach, using live case studies as they embarked on a data odyssey in order to understand, in real time, the data challenge people face.

We then held a series of stakeholder roundtables with academics, lawyers, technologists, people working in industry and civil society, which focused on diagnosing the problems and what potential solutions already look like, or could look like in the future, across multiple stakeholder groups. Find out more in our policy briefing.

You can watch a documentary produced by the project partners, law firm Schillings and the independent consumer data action service Rightly, and TVN, alongside this report, here.