Lawfulness, fairness and transparency

Lawfulness

You must have a valid legal basis before you process personal data (covered in detail in Section 4). No legal basis means no lawful processing, full stop.

Fairness

You must only process data in ways people would reasonably expect, and you must not use it to their detriment in a way they wouldn't anticipate. Fairness is about the impact of your processing on the individual, not just whether you followed the letter of the rules.

Transparency

You must be open about what data you collect, why, and what you do with it. In practice this means clear privacy notices, written in plain language, given to people at or before the point their data is collected.