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This article originally appeared in Bristows' Monthly Technology, Media and Telecommunications e-newsletter, The Cookie Jar.

An unremarkable dispute between two district council candidates before the High Court has led to an interesting decision on scope of the data protection principles of accuracy and fairness. It may provide some comfort to data controllers processing 'opinion' data.

The case concerned an election leaflet published by one candidate, Mr Peirce, which contained statements about a second candidate, Mr Quinton. These were designed to persuade the residents of Woodcote, Oxfordshire that Mr Quinton had not adequately represented them in their struggle against potential housing developments in and around the village. Mr Quinton alleged that the statements were factually untrue and issued a claim against Mr Peirce under the tort of injurious falsehood. In the alternative, Mr Quinton also claimed under two sections of the Data Protection Act 1998 that provide independent remedies of: (i) compensation where any breach of the Act has caused damage (and distress); and (ii) an order for rectification, blocking, erasure or destruction where personal data is found to be inaccurate.

The Judge dismissed the claim for injurious falsehood finding that whilst the statements might be "selective", they were not factually inaccurate and the defendants' had not acted maliciously.

Considering the data protection claim, the court proceeded on the basis that Mr Peirce was a data controller of Mr Quinton's personal data. Mr Quinton argued that the key principles of accuracy and fairness had been breached. Mr Justice Eady, however, did not accept this position. In respect of accuracy he saw no reason not to apply the same injurious falsehood criteria and standard. He therefore concluded that selective, 'cherry-picked' information was not inaccurate.

If anything, the court was even more dismissive on the subject of fairness. Although Mr Peirce had not given Mr Quinton the required statutory notice of his processing, Mr Justice Eady disagreed this was unfair; a contrary result he felt would be an "absurdity" and against the "intention of the legislature". Mr Quinton's claim under the Act was therefore rejected (the judge expressing relief at not having to consider what an order for rectification could practically require of Mr Peirce after publication).

The core message from this judgment is that in order for processing to be in breach of the accuracy principle, there must be a clear factual falsehood (i.e. stating a car is black when it is clearly white). This is good news for data controllers that regularly process opinions relating to an individual, such as the majority of the content on social network sites. The judge's purposive position on fairness is curious. It boldly implies an additional exception not contained in the wording of the Act from the obligation to provide processing information to data subjects. It will be interesting to see whether this implied "absurdity" exception is relied upon in future - there are some who wish that it existed for the Act as a whole.