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Scotland Act 1998

General

Data protection concerns obtaining, holding, processing and disclosure of personal data (i.e. information about individuals) and the free movement of such data.  Provision for this is currently made in the Data Protection Act 1998.  The 1998 Act, which received Royal Assent on 16 July 1998, consolidated and repealed the Data Protection Act 1984.  The 1998 Act is broader than the 1984 Act in two main respects.  As required by Council Directive 95/46/EC, it extends data protection legislation to cover manually-held records as well as records held on computer.  It also covers “accessible records” which are certain records in the social work, housing, health and education fields.  Some parts of the 1998 Act did not come into force until 1 March 2000, but all of those matters are nevertheless reserved matters.

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Text created by the government department responsible for the subject matter of the Act to explain what the Act sets out to achieve and to make the Act accessible to readers who are not legally qualified. Explanatory Notes were introduced in 1999 and accompany all Public Acts except Appropriation, Consolidated Fund, Finance and Consolidation Acts.

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