It is a privilege to be a joint-recipient in the fourth year of the “Michal Serzycki” Data Protection Award, and I thank the Data Protection Authority in Poland (UODO) for the recognition of work for the benefit of promoting data protection values and the right to privacy.
I appreciate the award in particular as the founder of an NGO, and the indirect acknowledgement of the value of NGOs to be able to contribute to public policy, including openness towards international perspectives, standards, the importance of working together, and our role in holding the actions of state authorities and power to account, under the rule of law.
The award is shared with Mrs Barbara Gradkowska, Director of the Special School and Educational Center in Zamość, whose work in Poland has been central to the initiative, Your Data — Your Concern, an educational Poland-wide programme for schools that is supported and recognized by the UODO. It offers support to teachers in vocational training centres, primary, middle and high schools related to personal data protection and the right to privacy in education.
And it is also shared with Mr Maciej Gawronski, Polish legal advisor and authority in data protection, information technology, cloud computing, cybersecurity, intellectual property and business law.
The UODO has long been a proactive advocate in the schools’ sector in Poland for the protection of children’s data rights, including recent enforcement after finding the processing of children’s biometric data using fingerprint readers unlawful, when using a school canteen and ensuring destruction of pupil data obtained unlawfully.
In the rush to remote learning in 2020 in response to school closures in COVID-19, the UODO warmly received our collective international call for action, a letter in which over thirty organisations worldwide called on policy makers, data protection authorities and technology providers, to take action, and encouraged international collaboration to protect children around the world during the rapid adoption of digital educational technologies (“edTech”). The UODO issued statements and a guide on school IT security and data protection.
In September 2020, I worked with their Data Protection Office at a distance, in delivering a seminar for teachers, on remote education.
The award also acknowledges my part in the development of the Guidelines on Children’s Data Protection in an Education Setting adopted in November 2020, working in collaboration with country representatives at the Council of Europe Committee for Convention 108, as well as with observers, and the Committee’s incredible staff.
2020 was a difficult year for people around the world under COVID-19 to uphold human rights and hold the space to push back on encroachment—especially for NGOs, and in community struggles from the Black Lives Matter movement to environmental action to UK students on the streets of London to protest algorithmic unfairness. In Poland the direction of travel is to reduce women’s rights in particular. Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party has been accused of politicising the constitutional tribunal and using it to push through its own agenda on abortion, and the government appears set on undermining the rule of law creating a ‘chilling effect’ for judges. The women of Poland are again showing the world, what it means and what it can cost to lose progress made.
In England at defenddigitalme, we are waiting to hear later this month, what our national Department for Education will do to better protect millions of children’s rights, in the management of national pupil records, after our Data Protection regulator, the ICO’s audit and intervention. Among other sensitive content, the National Pupil Database holds sexual orientation data on almost 3.2 million students’ named records, and religious belief on 3.7 million.
defenddigitalme is a call to action to protect children’s rights to privacy across the education sector in England, and beyond. Data protection has a role to play—within the broader rule of law— to protect and uphold the right to privacy, to prevent state interference in private and family life, and in the protection of the full range of human rights necessary in a democratic society. Fundamental human rights must be universally protected to foster human flourishing, to protect the personal dignity and freedoms of every individual, to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedoms.
The award was announced at the conference, “Real personal data protection in remote reality,” organized by the Personal Data Protection Office UODO, as part of the celebration of the 15th Data Protection Day on 28th January, 2021 with an award ceremony held on its eve in Warsaw.