A-Z of data protection: terms you need to know
U
UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK-GDPR)
• the UK’s own version of the GDPR following Brexit; while similar to the GDPR, it is complemented by the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 2018), which provides UK-specific details
unique identifier
• a persistent identifier that can be used to recognise a consumer, a family, or a device that is linked to a consumer or family, over time and across different services
• includes, but not limited to, an Internet Protocol address, cookies, customer number and telephone numbers
unsupervised learning
• the use of machine learning algorithms to discover hidden patterns in unlabelled datasets, without human intervention. It can be used for exploratory data analysis, to extract customer insights, or for image recognition
user authentication
• the process of verifying the identity of the individual trying to access a system, such as through passwords, one-time passwords (OTPs) or multi-factor authentication
user authorisation
• the process of providing an authenticated user access rights or permissions to specific parts of a system
