Data Access Tracker

Consumers have gained new personal data rights in many jurisdictions, under legislation such as the GDPR in Europe, the the CCPA in California, or the LGPD in Brazil.

One such right is the right to access the data that companies store about them, and get a copy.

As we tried to exercise our rights, we found difficulties. That’s not surprising, because the laws are new, and everybody is learning. Here are some of the difficulties we’ve encountered:

  • Some companies aren’t aware that they need to provide data to consumers who ask, and that it needs to be all such data, including that stored on the company’s behalf by service providers.

  • Some companies haven’t been asked before, or not often, and so the process until one gets one’s data is very cumbersome.

  • Some companies’s data exports seem to have been made by buggy software, resulting in mangled data that’s provided to the consumer.

  • Some companies provide data, but it appears to be incomplete.

  • Some companies provide data, but it appears to be incorrect or inconsistent with other data, such as a what is shown on their websites.

  • Some companies intentionally do not provide certain data, on various grounds that, to us, are not obviously justified under relevant legislation.

  • Some companies provide data in a way that is incomprehensible to the consumer.

  • …and more.

So we decided to set up an issue tracker, where we record the various issues we encountered and open it up for others to contribute, too.

Go to the issue tracker

We don’t know quite yet what we’ll do with this list of issues. For now, we only record them.

If you encounter similar issues when trying to exercise your rights, please to create new issue, so we can track your’s, too.

If you think an issue in our tracker is not valid, or has been fixed since it was reported, please do add a comment to the relevant issue.

Instigators: Johannes Ernst, Indie Computing Corp. and Richard Whitt, GLIA Foundation.