The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has produced a toolkit for organisations considering using data analytics, especially if your business is at the beginning of your data analytics project lifecycle.

It will help such businesses to recognise some of the central risks to the rights and freedoms of individuals created by the use of data analytics – a basic introduction to some of the risks that data analytics may create or exacerbate.

What is data analytics?

In this toolkit, it is defined as: “the use of software to automatically discover patterns in data sets (where those data sets contain personal data) and use them to make predictions, classifications, or risk scores.”

Integral to data analytics are algorithms, which are a set of mathematical instructions or rules that are given to computer systems to complete tasks.

This toolkit is designed for you to consider risks, rights and freedoms in the context of data protection law.

Once you have used the toolkit, a short report will be created that suggests practical actions you can take and provides links to additional guidance you could read that will help you improve your data protection compliance.

Read more about how the toolkit can help here.