In cases like Snap AI chatbot, Edwards seeks ‘agile enforcement’ for final three years as ICO chief

MLex Market Insight

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4.9 • 9 Ratings

🗓️ 2 November 2023

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Approaching his second anniversary as the UK’s Information Commissioner, John Edwards believes the culture change he has led since taking the job at the start of 2022 has the regulator ready for an “agile” spectrum of responses to data protection problems. Sitting down with MLex recently for an extended conversation at the Global Privacy Assembly meetings in Bermuda, Edwards discussed the need for data protection regulators to have a more assertive response to the privacy risks of generative artificial intelligence than they had to the rise of social media business models more than a decade ago. For companies that want to comply with UK data protection law, Edwards said the ICO now has an array of tools and guidance showing that “we’re there to walk with you and to help you” comply with the law. Edwards believes the UK has a unique and important place on the world’s data protection stage — close to Europe in terms of its privacy law but influenced by the US and the Pacific Rim in terms of its interpretation. “We have potential to act as a bridge between different data protection traditions,” he said.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to another podcast from MLEX. I'm Mike Swift and I'm the Global Chief
0:16.2	Correspondent for Privacy and Data Security at Mlex. And I'm speaking to you today from my base in San
0:22.0	Francisco, California.
0:24.6	Today our conversation is with John Edwards, the Information Commissioner for the United
0:28.8	Kingdom.
0:30.3	I first met and interviewed Edwards in 2017 when he was the New Zealand Privacy Commissioner,
0:35.7	and also the chair of the Global Privacy Assembly,
0:38.3	which was meeting that year in Hong Kong.
0:41.3	Edwards at the time was the data protection chief for a relatively small country, but even back then,
0:47.3	from the parade of data protection regulators who stopped by to seek his opinion as we chatted,
0:52.3	it was clear to me that he was an important and influential person
0:55.2	in the data protection world. Since then, Edwards has stepped out to a much larger stage at the ICO,
1:01.6	where he took the helm at the beginning of 2022. I spoke to Edwards at the margins of the
1:07.6	2023 Global Privacy Assembly Conference in Bermuda. And as you'll hear today,
1:13.7	Edwards favors an approach where he says the ICO won't measure success by the number of fines it
1:19.4	imposes, but will also focus on guiding companies to stay in compliance with the law to prevent
1:26.2	violations in the first place.
1:28.3	An approach Edwards says will allow the ICO to maximize its finite resources.
1:34.3	We discussed a number of other interesting topics, including a new court decision over the
1:39.3	ICOs find to Clearview AI, the facial recognition startup, and its preliminary order to
1:45.8	SNAP over SNAP's My AI artificial intelligence chatbot, an order, Edwards said, was
1:52.5	intended as a, quote, signal to the market on the quick deployment of AI systems.
	...

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