Drawing on the results of an extensive questionnaire of European Data Protection Authorities (DPAs), this chapter explores these regulators’ substantive orientation and detailed approach to standard-setting in the area of professional journalism under the Data Protection Directive. As regards news production, a large majority of DPAs accepted that the special expressive purposes derogation was engaged. Notwithstanding a greater emphasis on an internal balancing of rights within default data protection norms, this also remained the plurality view also as regards news archives. Detailed standard-setting was explored through hypothetical scenarios relating to undercover investigative journalism and data subject access demands made of journalists. It was found that, notwithstanding conflicts in many cases with statutory transparency and sensitive data provisions, all DPAs accepted the essential legitimacy of undercover journalism and over one-third only required that such activity conform to a permissive public interest test that didn’t explicitly incorporate a necessity threshold. In contrast, a much stricter approach was taken to the articulation of standards relating to subject access, with over one-third arguing that, aside from protecting information relating to sources, journalists would be obliged to comply with the default rules here in full. This difference may be linked to the divergent treatment of these issues within self-regulatory media codes: whilst almost all set down general ‘ethical’ norms applicable to undercover journalism, almost none did so as regards subject access. Despite the general tendency to ‘read down’ statutory provisions relating to undercover journalism, the severity of a DPAs’ approach to each scenario remained strongly correlated with the stringency of local law applicable to journalism.
Relation extraction for inferring access control rules from natural language artifacts
