Empowering people through data intermediaries

Data intermediaries are third-party organisations that act on behalf of individuals to exercise their data subject rights. This helps people access, manage and share their data more easily, allowing them to benefit from data they have contributed to or helped generate. Services range from secure personal data storage to donating health data to support scientific research.

The government call for evidence published last year identified key issues affecting data intermediaries, individuals, data controllers, data processors and other stakeholders.

These include:

• awareness — many people do not know their data subject rights or how they could benefit from using them
• friction — third-party data access requests are often slow and burdensome, and data controllers lack the incentives to improve this
• legal ambiguity — confusion about the legal roles of data intermediaries and the ability to delegate data subject rights to them, which underpins the other challenges

This consultation sets out legislative and non-legislative options to address these issues. Some options are more direct, others are quicker to implement, and some aim to deliver longer-term structural change. The options are intended to be complementary and can be taken forward individually or together.