“[T]he GDPR has strangled small businesses and tech firms alike in a web of unnecessary regulation … Ten years after the Brexit referendum we should not still be following ridiculous EU privacy laws that hurt British businesses,” Reform UK MP Robert Jenrick said in a statement.
The EU GDPR provides for a wider set of individual rights around personal data (including the “right to be forgotten”) than New Zealand’s Privacy Act does.
However, Reform UK stressed in its press release that following the New Zealand model would preserve the U.K.’s EU data adequacy status, meaning personal data would still be allowed to flow freely between the U.K. and EU.
The European Commission only grants adequacy to countries that provide an essentially equivalent level of data protection to that of the EU.
The U.K. has already diverged from Brussels on privacy laws with the passage of the Data (Use and Access) Act last year, which relaxed some aspects of the U.K. GDPR in a bid to boost economic growth.