Since February a machine may decide things about a British person that it may not decide about a French one.

Britain has spent a decade arguing about what to do with the data law it inherited. In February it did something.

The replacement of Article 22 of the UK GDPR by Articles 22A to 22D, in force since 5 February, leaves the equivalent European provision untouched. Article 22 of the EU GDPR still frames a decision made by machine alone about a significant matter as prohibited unless an exception applies. The British version now frames it as permitted, with safeguards attached after the fact, unless special category data is involved.

Practitioners advising across both jurisdictions describe this as the most material divergence from the EU regime since Brexit. That is their characterisation and it is theirs rather than ours. The mechanics, though, are not in dispute. The same credit refusal, the same insurance price, the same account closure, may now be decided by software alone on one side of the Channel and not the other.

For a firm operating in both, that is not a liberation. It is two builds, two sets of records, two answers to the same customer question, and a compliance team maintaining the difference. The looser standard does not replace the stricter one for anybody with European customers. It sits alongside it.

Which raises a question about who the change is actually for. A large British insurer with European business gains little, because it must build to the stricter standard anyway. The firm that gains is the one operating in Britain only, selling to British customers, with no European exposure to force its hand. That is a smaller, more domestic sort of company than the ones usually invoked when data rules are described as a burden on British competitiveness.

There is also a longer thread here that this desk has pulled before. European data adequacy, the arrangement letting personal data flow from the EU to the UK without extra machinery, rests on Brussels regarding British protection as essentially equivalent. Divergence is precisely the thing adequacy assessments examine. Nothing in this suggests adequacy is in danger today, and nobody serious is claiming it is. But the direction of travel is a matter of record now rather than of speculation.

What Britain has bought with the change is speed for firms that operate here only. What it has taken on is a standing job of demonstrating that a looser default still amounts to essentially equivalent protection.

We looked for a government assessment published alongside the February commencement setting out the adequacy implications and did not find one. As ever, that is what we found rather than proof of what does not exist.

WHY IT MATTERS HERE: The question of whether a judgement job survives is usually asked about technology. Here it is being answered by jurisdiction. A British underwriter and a French one face the same software and different law, and for the moment the British one is the more exposed.