No data protection commissioner since January

Nationalist MEP Roberta Metsola has hit out at a new law that enables the government to collect personal and sensitive data of school children, saying that the potential for abuse is staggering. 

The MEP also said that no information and data protection commissioner had yet been appointed since John Ebejer retired in mid-January.

Legal Notice 76 of 2014 allows the education minister to order any educational institution – from childcare and pre-primary to higher education institutions – to furnish sensitive information related “to age, sex, ability, educational attainments and other data...” for research or employment advice.

 “Parents, teachers and students alike are naturally worried and are asking all sorts of questions. This government’s half-baked attempt to explain itself has done nothing to alleviate people’s concerns. It must come clean and explain to us why it is necessary for data on the ability and educational attainments of our children in pre-primary school to be collected.

“Who has access to the data? Where and how is this data being stored? Why was this passed through without a public debate? It is almost as if the legal notice was published with the hope that no one would notice. It is like something out of a George Orwell novel,” Metsola said.

Education minister Evarist Bartolo has defended the legal notice, saying the rules clearly state that the data will be used for research purposes and to provide for adequate advice to be given on employment prospects. He also said that the Office of the Commissioner for Information and Data Protection had approved the legal notice and a parliamentary question on the legal notice had already been tabled.

“It is not possible to have valid research and analysis without the data to compute, and furthermore, in order to implement Jobs+ initiatives, the data needs to be collected as otherwise focus policies such as the Employability Index and the Youth Guarantee would not be possible.

“Under the previous government important research such as the PIRLS, TIMSS and PISA studies were not published.”

On her part, Metsola said that the government had not yet appointed a new national Data Protection Commissioner for Malta. “Who will now oversee that this data is not being abused of? Where can people go for redress? This is not something to take lightly – the law also allows for the prosecution of those teachers or heads of schools who refuse to comply with these requests.”