Current status: Answered by Jenny Gilruth on 30 October 2024
To ask the Scottish Government, in light of the findings in the report, The Ethical Basis of the Scottish Health and Wellbeing Census, 2021-22, by Lindsay Paterson, Emeritus Professor of Education Policy at the University of Edinburgh, which outlines ethical failings in how data was gathered, how it will give all children and families the right to request deletion of their data, and whether it will commit to deleting all data gathered, in light of the reported concerns that it is unfit to be used by ethical researchers.
The Scottish Government takes the privacy of citizen’s data very seriously and is committed to ensuring that the personal data we hold complies with the Data Protection Act and the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR).
The UK GDPR gives individuals the right to have personal data erased, and requests for deletion can be made to the data controller(s) of the personal data. However, the right is not absolute and only applies in certain circumstances.
The right to erasure does not apply if processing is necessary for some specific purposes, including for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority, or for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific research, historical research or statistical purposes where erasure is likely to render impossible or seriously impair the achievement of that processing.