What is the Data Protection Act and What Does it Cover?

The Data Protection Act was legislation passed in the United Kingdom in 2018 to establish and strengthen consumer data privacy laws. It is largely concerned with protecting consumer identities in an increasingly online world, in an effort to thwart things like identify theft and fraud. You can read about the importance of data protection here.

The Act is broken up into seven parts, each one addressing a specific area of data protection, including facets concerning data collection, data ownership, data processing and policy enforcement. The Data Protection Act applied a lot of the standards already found in the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (often referred to as GDPR).

While the United States hasn’t adopted similar legislation on a federal level, the state of California has its own laws on the books—the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). It mirrors a lot of the regulations you’ll see in the Data Protection Act and GDPR as well. Find more details on the CCPA here.