‘De minimis non curat Lex’ are, apocryphally, the words by which, some 50 years ago, the receptionist of a London branch of Lex Garages turned away me and my beaten-up Mini. More recently in respect of de minimis, in X v Zautoriteit Persoonsgegevens (2022) C-245/20, a decision about an exception for the protection of the independence of the judiciary, the Attorney General observed at paras [59] and [60] that:
‘In this new age, where one finds an endless drive towards increased automation, it seems that almost any aspect of any activity may, sooner or later, be connected to a machine which, increasingly, has its own data processing capabilities. Most of the time, the use of such data will be ancillary or “de minimis”, so that in many cases no “real” processing activity takes place. However, and still, it would appear that neither the nature of the operation (mere transmission versus effective work on and with the data), the method of the potential disclosure
