I will be participating in a webinar on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on November 9th along with ZL Technologies and Viewpointe (you can sign up for it here).
In one of our planning meetings for this event, the topic of Subject Access Requests (SARs) was discussed. One of the presenters wondered if SARs could somehow be used by anarchists or others to cause massive disruption to an organization. Given that data subjects in the European Union have the right to request any information about them that a data controller possesses, usually without a fee, and that requests must be processed within a month, what would happen if an organized group (are anarchists, by definition, organized?) flooded an organization with SARs in a very short period of time. There are situations in which data controllers are not obligated to provided data under an SAR, such as GDPR Article 23 which allows the Legal Professional Privilege (LPP) as an exemption to fulfillment of an SAR. However, this is a fairly limited exemption and would not prevent the type of planned disruption that might be made possible under the GDPR.
The potential for causing mass disruption using SARs is not as far-fetched as some might consider it to be. Given that it will take several hours to process a single request for a company that has not implemented an appropriate classification and archiving capability for all of the potentially relevant organization it has on data subjects, the potential for disruption is enormous. For example, if we very conservatively assume that just two person-hours would be required to process an SAR and someone wanted to “attack” an organization with 5,000 SARs in a single week, that would obligate a data controller to spend 10,000 person-hours — about five person-years — processing these requests in a very short period of time. While such a scenario against any single entity is unlikely, the likelihood that it will occur to some company is rather high, as is the risk: few organizations’ legal or IT teams have such an excess of labor available to them to deal with this type of occurrence.
This is just one of the topics we will be discussing at the webinar on November 9th. I hope you can join us.