Rectification of Data
Computer Stuff April 11th, 2005I was reading the latest issue (852) of Auto Express over the weekend and came accross the article entitled ‘Your Car’s Secret History Exposed’. The article covers how the history of a vehicle can be discovered by using a car history check service. The Auto Express team visited an HPI, one of many such services, call centre and listened in on a number of calls.
One particular conversation came from the seller of a vehicle who wanted to find out what information would be given to potential buyers of his vehicle by HPI. His car had been stolen a year ago but was recovered by the Police. The owner proceded to repair the damage and thought all was well once again. That’s not what HPI thought.The history check that was performed showed that the car was stillrecorded as stolen. The owner disputed this and consequently his storywas checked out with his insurer and the information held by HPI ontheir database was updated. If the owner hadn’t have made this phonecall and paid the fee to receive the history of his vehicle then anypotential buyers would have been deterred from the purchase.
I feel that this raises questions about how data stored is kept relevant or up to date. Section 14 of the Data Protection Act 1998states that a data subject has the right to request the respective datacontroller to rectify the data. In the case mentioned this is whathappened.
I believe that it should be the right of the data subject to expectdata to be kept accurate wherever this process is feasably possible. Inthis case, the data subject would be the vehicle, due to theinformation being about vehicle. Obviously this would have thepotential to be huge and affect so many companies and indeviduals, nodoubt why this hasn’t been adopted. Such an ammendment to the DataProtection Act would simply be unviable. I ask the question though,what use is all this stored data if it is inaccurate?
Eventually it will reach a stage that if any of your personal detailschange, you will have to notify all organisations who keep hold thisinformation on file - this has the potential to be hundreds, if notthousands, of organisations. If there is not already a need, there willbe a need for some simplification of this process otherwise ourdatabases will be rendered useless with old, inaccurate data.
2 Responses to “Rectification of Data”
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April 14th, 2005 at 10:21 am
This is a very thorny question, and there is no quick an easy solution to the problem. Companies will argue that it’s in their customers’ best interests to keep their information updated, customers moan that there’s too many places to update this information.
Maybe the Office of the Information Comissioner should propose a system, like the Telephone Preference Service, that would aim to update a person’s personal information on many databases. This may prove to be one solution for the UK, since all customer information databases in the UK have to be registered with the Information Comissioner.
But then we enter into technicalities about disclosure of information to companies that you may not actually want to tell (telemarketing, etc…), and the other issue that data is stored differently from one organisation to another.
Whatever someone thinks of to lessen the burden will have a fatal disadvantage of some sort, you can guarantee it.
(How’s this for testing the length of comments? :-P)
April 14th, 2005 at 4:58 pm
I’d certainly agree that it won’t be easy to come up with a solution. We shall have to see what comes I guess.
I’d say that was a suitably long comment to test the limit was off!!