Following the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) Guidance on AI and data protection published last year, ICO recently released its new data analytics toolkit for organisations considering using data analytics.

As a starting point, the toolkit is designed to help organisations consider the risks, rights and freedoms in the context of data protection law. It provides a definition of data analytics considering it to be : “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.”

The toolkit takes users through a brief series of questions to help orient them to relevant considerations. After responding to these questions, the user receives a summary guidance report on next-steps and appropriate measures to implement data protection principles.

The toolkit is mainly useful for organisations at the beginning of their data analytics project lifecycle and organisations should not rely on the latter to ensure effective and full compliance with data protection regulatory requirements.