Keyword: open government

For governments across the globe, public registers are an increasingly popular means to help achieve a range of objectives. These include safeguarding the independence of judiciary, upholding food hygiene and safety standards, fostering proper use of subsidies, and protecting the public from unqualified professionals. Most public registers are subject to data protection laws because they contain some form of personal data. In the Netherlands, the number of online public register has risen dramatically. On the basis of exploratory research on Dutch public registers, we hypothesised that governments easily assume that public registers serve their designated goals, but rarely adequately assess their effectiveness. A comprehensive analysis of registers confirms that hypothesis is correct. This is problematic from the perspective of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the human right to privacy as enshrined in, for example, Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR). Both require that the means used to serve a (legitimate) purpose are proportionate to the (potential) privacy harms. Based on the experience in the Netherlands, in this chapter we query to what extent and by which means policy and lawmakers actually test effectiveness of public registers and analyse the privacy implications from the perspective of proportionality. The adoption of open government policies combined with technological possibilities result in a strong growth of online public registers, and possibilities to link data from multiple sources multiply. The potential privacy impacts on individuals need to be better understood and safeguarded already at the design stages of public registers.