11 June 2021 — Big Brother Watch

BREAKING

More
Big Brother Watch has urgently questioned the legality of the Government’s vaccine passport trials at Wembley Stadium for the Euro 2020 matches.

In a letter sent today to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), we questioned how the stadium might use fans’ vaccination and test data and what the legal basis for the data collection is, citing multiple apparent failures in DCMS’ privacy policy.

The letter sent by our solicitors, AWO, warns that the controversial vaccine passport trial appears to be “occurring unlawfully and in non-compliance with the GDPR”.

Together, we vowed to bring “the greatest possible fight” against Covid passes – and thanks to 3,179 of you supporting this campaign on Crowdfunder, we are.

The stronger the support we have, the stronger the fight we can build – so please keep up your fantastic support and share our Crowdfunder far and wide!

Fans at the England v Croatia match on Sunday will be required show proof they have received both Covid vaccinations on the NHS app, which may be “scanned” and “collected” by the stadium according to the privacy policy. Alternatively, fans must evidence a negative result from a Lateral Flow Test, despite the tests being self-administered and the results self-reported. The UK’s multi-billion pound Innova brand tests were slammed today by the US’ leading authority, the FDA, which advised they are “thrown in the bin” due to inaccuracy concerns.

We’ve urged DCMS to respond by Monday afternoon and explain whether and how the trial complies with the UK’s data privacy laws.

We’re poised to bring a legal challenge on privacy and equality grounds, should the Government proceed with COVID-status certification plans.

Wonderful scenes of fans back in stadiums leave a bad taste in the mouth when the only way they could get in is to hand over sensitive medical data.

This is not getting us back to normal, it’s getting us towards a dystopian society.

Building a country of checkpoints is not building back better.

We have no idea how the stadium might use fans’ vaccine data and are shocked by the slap dash way the Government has gone about such a serious medical privacy issue.

Covid passes are completely incompatible with our rights and the sooner these plans are scrapped, the better.

Thank you

Silkie

Director of Big Brother Watch