On September 7, 2011, the United Kingdom Information Tribunal published a decision that appears to resolve the long-running uncertainty regarding the extent to which anonymized personal information may be disclosed under the UK’s Freedom of Information legislation. The UK’s FOIA was introduced and applicable to most of the UK in 2000, with equivalent law following for Scotland in 2002.
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In short, the High Court’s current position appears to be that if a data controller removes enough identifiers from a copy set of personal data to ensure the controller itself is unable to translate the anonymized copy back into personal data, then the anonymized copy can be disclosed to a third party pursuant to a FOIA request.
Read more on Hunton & Williams Privacy and Information Security Law Blog.
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