Controlling Access to Personal Information

By: Matthew Strawbridge - Updated: 25 May 2018 | *Discuss

 

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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

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

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

NB*The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) superseded the UK Data Protection Act 1998 on May 25, 2018. The new policy expands the rights of individuals to control how their personal data is collected and processed. It places a range of new obligations on organisations to be more accountable for data protection.

Organisations are obliged to have technical and procedural measures in place to safeguard the personal information they hold.

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Vetting Potential Employees

Ensuring Physical Privacy for Employees

Employee Medical Histories

Writing an Official Privacy Policy

Privacy of Employee Remuneration

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