Whilst researching open registers of data controllers, I was left with some interesting data on international data transfers which didn’t make it into my main research paper. This formed the basis of a short paper for the 2014 Web Science conference which took place last month.

The paper presents a brief analysis of the destinations of 16,000 personal data transfers from the UK. Each ‘transfer’ represents an arrangement between a data controller in the UK to send data to a country located overseas. Many of these destinations are simply listed by the rather general categories of ‘European Economic Area’ or ‘Worldwide’, so the analysis focuses on just those transfers where specific countries were mentioned.

I found that even when we adjust for the size of their existing UK export market, countries whose data protection regimes are approved as ‘adequate’ by the European Commission had higher rates of data transfers. This indicates that easing legal restrictions on cross-border transfers does indeed positively correlate with a higher number of transfers (although the direction of causation can’t be established). I was asked by the organisers to produce a graphic to illustrate the findings, so I’m sharing that below.