Everyone’s Invited… regulators included?

The increasingly popular website Everyone’s Invited (everyonesinvited.uk) contains thousands of ‘testimonies’ by victims of sexual abuse and misconduct, largely—but by no means exclusively—at private schools. The testimonies are described as being anonymised, although many carry the name of the school or, in some cases, the college or university. It has quickly become a primary source of information, and it also has an Instagram account with tens of thousands of followers.

Data only becomes ‘personal data’ when it is information relating to an identifiable individual and, generally speaking, it will not be possible to identify individuals from these testimonies. Nevertheless, that may not always be the case where there is a named school, year group, description of an individual and so on. For instance, one complaint that was then reported in the media referred to the complainant being part of a cohort of 40 girls