Controlling Access to Personal Information

Personal information has value and must be safeguarded. It is understandable that people wish to keep private all manner of information about themselves. When they trust their information to an organisation, that organisation has a duty of care to secure the details and to use them responsibly.

In fact, their responsibility extends beyond a duty of care – companies have a legal obligation to collect, use and store personal records responsibly. The Data Protection Act 1998, enforced by the Information Commissioner’s Office, governs how UK businesses may handle knowledge about living people.

Customers

When a company collects facts about its customers, it must state how it intends to use them and must not do something else instead. Businesses may not pass their lists on to third parties without consent, and must not keep the contents longer than necessary.

Employees

Although the Data Protection Act is usually thought of in terms of knowledge about customers, it is equally applicable to the details a business holds about its own employees.

The Human Resources department will keep records about their staff. This will cover the obvious things such as addresses and telephone numbers. Staff that are paid electronically into their bank accounts will also have handed over their bank details, and records will be kept of national insurance numbers, tax codes and the total remuneration package they receive. All of these things have some value to people outside the organisation: fraudsters looking to commit identity theft, or the company’s competitors who would like to know how much they pay their staff.

Because of this, it is important that records about employees are held securely, and that the right to use them is rigorously controlled.

Practical Measures to Control Access to Information

Suppose a company keeps a computerised list of its personal customers. This represents a major business asset, and it should be defended. It could be very harmful, for example, if an employee were to be poached by a competitor and decided to take a copy of all the customer records to his or her new job!

So it makes sense for the company to hold customer records in a form that cannot easily be copied; at the very least, such copying should be logged by the system. Just think of all the bad publicity that has come from government departments losing people’s records that should never have been copied to unsecured systems in the first place.

Stringent security measures not only secure the assets of the company, but they also protect the individuals to whom the data relates. Other things that can help are granting rights on a “need to know” basis, and using passwords and encryption.

Even if personal information is being held on paper, there needs to be adequate physical security in place to control who has access to it.

Defending Your Own Information

Under the Data Protection Act, you have the right to access information held about you and to correct it if it is inaccurate. This right is known as subject access. You may have to pay a small fee to cover the administration of your request.

Organisations are obliged to have adequate technical and procedural measures in place to safeguard the personal information they hold. If you do not believe that an organisation that you have entrusted your records to is behaving responsibly, you have cause to complain to them, or ultimately to the Information Commissioner.