UK: first enforcement notice under GDPR shows extra-territorial reach

The UK data protection regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), has issued its first enforcement notice under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The notice is particularly noteworthy because it has been issued against a company located in Canada, which does not appear to have any presence within the EU. The ICO found that the company, AggregateIQ Data Services Ltd, failed to comply with the GDPR in a number of ways, including by processing personal information in a way that the data subjects were not aware of, for purposes which they would not have expected, and without a lawful basis for that processing. It is understood that the notice is being appealed. The extraterritorial reach of the GDPR is as yet untested and, without any regulatory guidance as to interpretation, how that appeal plays out may be an early indicator as to the issues that could arise in extra-territorial enforcement under the GDPR. For further information, see the article written by our data protection team, which was first published in the November 2018 issue of PLC Magazine.