My Lords, I, too, support the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones. As this is the first time I have spoken during the passage of the Bill, I should also declare my interests, but it seems that all the organisations I am involved in process data, so I refer the Committee to all the organisations in my entry in the register of interests.
I want to tell a story about the challenges of distinguishing between personal data and pseudonymised data. I apologise for bringing everyone back to the world of Covid, but that was when I realised how possible it is to track down individuals without any of their personal data. Back in November or December 2020, when the first variant of Covid, the Kent variant, was spreading, one test that was positive for the Kent variant came with no personal details at all. The individual who had conducted that test had not filled in any of the information. I was running NHS Test and Trace and we had to try to find that individual, in a very public way. In the space of three days, with literally no personal information—no name, address or sense of where they lived—the team was able to find that human being. Through extraordinary ingenuity, it tracked them down based on the type of tube the test went into—the packaging that was used—and by narrowing down the geography of the number of postcodes where the person might have been ill and in need of help but also in need of identifying all their contacts.
I learned that it was possible to find that one human being, out of a population of 60 million, within three days and without any of their personal information. I tell this story because my noble friend Lord Kamall made such an important point that, at the heart of data legislation is the question of how you build trust in the population. We have to build on firm foundations if the population are to trust that there are reasons why sharing data is hugely valuable societally. To have a data Bill that does not have firm foundations in absolutely and concretely defining personal data is quite a fatal flaw.
Personal data being subjective, as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, so eloquently set out, immediately starts citizens on a journey of distrusting this world.
There is so much in this world that is hard to trust, and I feel strongly that we have to begin with some very firm foundations. They will not be perfect, but we need to go back to a solid definition of “personal data”, which is why I wholeheartedly support the noble Lord’s amendments.