About

Fifty notes on employment data protection, written as paperwork rather than as law.

Who it is for

Whoever has to do it with their hands: an HR lead, an operations manager, the owner of a small business. Not a lawyer, and not a data protection officer in a large organisation with a team.

The position

Compliance for an employer is mostly a filing problem. The judgements are few; the documents are specific and almost never produced.

Almost every failure is documentary — not having written something down, rather than having decided wrongly.

The clocks start earlier than people assume, and the windows are lost at the beginning.

Consistency matters more than completeness, because a contradiction between documents says nobody maintains them.

What is deliberately absent

Product and vendor names.

Penalty figures. Quoting them is a technique for selling compliance products, and it pushes organisations toward purchases rather than toward order.

Specific legal conclusions. The obligations described recur widely in shape and differ substantially in content.

Nothing here is legal advice

Every specific answer requires local advice. What this is for is making that advice cheaper: an employer arriving with a map, a record and a schedule is asking about the hard parts rather than paying somebody to build the filing.

About this domain

This address previously carried an e-commerce coaching business. There is a page about that.