Data Protection Act, What Does It Actually Mean ?

Personal information and privacy are all part of "our" human rights. In another life I used to have the job of examining who could be put under legal surveillance (nothing to do with a local authorities by the way, who have often been rightly accused in some cases of abusing their powers). If I decided there was a case to answer I would send it to an approved authoriser who could legally take away their human rights in the interests of justice and place them under scrutiny subject to regular reviews.

The whole process of disclosure is not as clear cut as the public might think. If anyone breaks the law by giving away privileged information they can end up in serious trouble. You will often find many people will err on the side of caution when deciding what to provide.

 

I used to spend so much time shredding mail etc with minor personal info on in the UK for fear of ID fraud etc.
(Experienced 2 occasions where someone tried to get credit in my name against my address but managed to stop it).

Moving over the water to Sweden a couple of years ago had me sweating at the amount of info that is publicly available.
With someone's name you can get addresses, phone numbers, DOB, streetview of their house, family etc.
With a reg number you can access all sorts of stuff about someone and their vehicle.
Everyone is tracked by the equiv of their NI number, and nothing can be done without it.

It seems that they have it all out in the open here and yet ID fraud is much less of a worry. This may in some ways be due to the fact that they do not take card details over the phone for payments etc, but instead want to have paper billing mandates sent out and done with signitures etc before monies change hands. E banking is not a handy thing here, but a necessity, so security must be handled in a different way in the background of the IT I suppose.

 

All the above is very easily accessible to those that have the correct access and one of the threats is that "insiders" are now planted in ( including government) certain institutions with a view to harvesting such information and then passing it on. There have been several attacks on government and other systems with a view to defrauding the government etc and ultimately the taxpayer by using and creating certain information that allows monies to come their way. Fortunately few succeed due to certain built in safeguards and triggers.

 

@Red998
but what do the countries do that is inherently different, to allow general public access to all here, yet moderated access and thus the necessary skullduggery in UK? My UK background makes me quite wary of the set up in Scandinavia, yet no one seems concerned here at all.

 

It is down to the legal avenues that are allowed to be explored. They are different depending on what you are trying to prove and why. When I was involved in these matters you had to prove proportionality into what you wanted to look into and if this was not proven I for one would not accept any application for information or surveillance and therefore would not pass it on to the powers that be.

The largest misuse of powers in this country has been by local authorities who have, in some cases for example, mounted surveillance on someone who is just not recycling their rubbish properly!! These sort of applications are examined independently every year by the office of the surveillance commissioner and if it is found that any authority has flouted the law the the right to search for certain types information or mount any form of legal surveillance is withdrawn.

No doubt in Sweden the matter is quite different as it is then down to what is in the public domain. In this country there is a lot that is within the public domain and is legally accessible by those that know where and how to look. The biggest pitfall for many dishonest people is social media, they shoot themselves in the foot.