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UK: Sensitive personal data exposed in Open Datasets

Posted on January 12, 2015 by Dissent

If at first you don’t succeed, persist. And blog.

Jon Baines writes:

Imagine, if you will, a public authority which decides to publish as Open Data a spreadsheet of 6000 individual records of adults receiving social services support. Each row tells us an individual service user’s client group (e.g. “dementia” or “learning disability”), age range (18-64, 65-84, 84 and over), the council ward they live in, the service they’re receiving (e.g. “day care” or “direct payment” or “home care”), their gender and their ethnicity. If, by burrowing into that data, one could identify that reveals that one, and only one, Bangladeshi man in the Blankety ward aged 18-64 with a learning disability is in receipt of direct payments, most data protection professionals (and many other people besides) would recognise that this is an identifiable individual, if not to you or me, then almost certainly to some of his neighbours or family or acquaintances.

[…]

If these individuals are identifiable (and, trust me, these are only two examples from hundreds, in many, many spreadsheets), then this is their sensitive personal data which is being processed by the public authority in question (which I am not identifying, for obvious reasons). For the processing to be fair and lawful it needs a legal basis, by the meeting of at least one of the conditions in Schedule Two and one in Schedule Three of the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA).

And try as I might, I cannot find one which legitimises this processing, not even in the 2000 Order which significantly added to the Schedule 3 conditions. And this was why, when the datasets in question were drawn to my attention, I flagged my concerns up with the public authority

Read more on Information Rights and Wrongs.

It’s somewhat disturbing that Jon not only had to raise the issue, but the lack of timely and effective responses he got is also concerning. Although DataBreaches.net is a U.S. site, the exposure of personal information anywhere is of concern, and we urge the Information Commissioner’s Office to either get those data sets removed already or explain why such disclosure is lawful under U.K. law.

No related posts.

Category: ExposureGovernment SectorNon-U.S.

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