Categorisation of Personal Data

Dear All,

in the next couple of weeks we intend to work extensively on the 
categorisation of data, in part in working sessions here in Vienna since 
Harsh is coming from Ireland to visit the WU and Elmar is around at the 
TU Vienna. As some of the work will be done F2F we will keep you updated 
and would like to invite everyone to get involved in the process.

A first step would be to discuss and maybe identify the crucial 
challenge for a standard categorisation of personal data to work. 
According to the GDPR Art.4 No. 1, personal data is [A] “any information 
relating to an identified or identifiable natural person” or [B] 
“different pieces of information, which collected together that can lead 
to the identification of a particular person."

This definition already indicates a problem of fragmentation as well as 
identification that we would like to address and eventually solve. One 
way, as it is somewhat standardly done, is to tie up the categorisation 
to purposes or contexts in which the personal data appears such as in 
finance, health or judicial data. One the one hand, this seems justified 
since for example health data is a subclass of sensitive data according 
to the GDPR and requires the explicit consent of the individual in 
question. On the other hand, data elements may appear in various 
contexts and thus are not easily pinned down as personal just because of 
this context. It seems that processing and statistical augmentation play 
a big role as well when considering profiling, scoring but also 
behavioural data. Another difficulty arises with the public vs. open 
character of some of the personal data.

Since Mark already mentioned that he struggled with finding a satisfying 
categorisation on his own, it would be very helpful to receive such 
unfinished attempts to get a better grasp on the challenges and 
requirements. Looking forward to hear from you!

Best,

Niklas

-- 
Niklas Kirchner
Institute for Information Systems and New Media
Vienna University of Economics and Business

Email: niklas.kirchner@wu.ac.at

Received on Friday, 16 November 2018 12:33:21 UTC