No Data Protection please, we are British — Privacy, Porn and Prurience in the Digital Economy Bill

Abstract

Overshadowed in the public debate by the seismic shift in the legal and political landscape that the UK’s decision to leave the European Union brought with it, the Digital Economy Bill is currently quietly making its way through the legislative process. The paper discusses some of the data protection implications of the bill, with a focus on the proposed regulation of online adult content. It will argue that the bill is a paradigmatic example of the way in which data protection, or rather differential denial of data protection, can be leveraged to promote and enforce normative conceptions of sexuality, without having to explicitly commit the government to a “moral agenda”.