Thinktank States the Obvious about the Government and our Data!
By Dave Adamson in Reader
Posted in Data, Government on December 10, 2007 at 12:55 pm
“The government needs to ensure greater protection for people’s personal information,” begins a BBC News online report from the thinktank Demos.
I feel that my career direction should head towards thinktanks at some point or another because without them we’d not be able to see the blatantly obvious!
The loss of discs of data by any organisation is a bit of misfortunate, but add this to the loss of god knows how many laptops and a belief that “we’re pretty sure they haven’t fallen into the wrong hands” is downright bizarre. I bet if they’d been asked a few weeks before the event, those in the know would have crowed “we’re pretty sure that the data will be safe.” I guess we should just be glad that it wasn’t a print out with a fancy cover and a little tiny girls’ diary padlock on the front - though that would have probably proven more secure.
Surely, it is implicit in the nature of any organisation handling data that said data, regardless of the “importance” is handled in a secure, confidential manner that is fit for purpose! Procedures should exist for the protection of all data handled, in the same way that one wouldn’t give out your own home address, telephone number and bank account details to anyone who just happened to ask for them. Oh, wait a minute, some people would.
Anyway, I digress. I do believe that any government should share with us details about how data pertaining to us is being used and how this could impact on our lives - after all, banks and loan companies advise us when you apply for a loan/credit card any other services - they advise us of the credit agency that they will refer to and, in theory, we can have this data sent to us and corrected if the need is there. Companies can also be asked to make available to us, under the Data Protection Act, information that they hold about us - I guess this could even stretch, if it doesn’t already, to being able to access CCTV recordings. Data, not the information that the data becomes once interpreted, seems to be the true currency of our time. We can’t escape this fact and nor should we expect to. Sadly, we are only a number to some organisations and, furthermore, it seems the government of today (as with many organisations the world over) is quite happy to forget that behind that number there is a person .
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