Blacklists and Perfect Storms

Well, a pox on The Consulting Association, a Droitwich-based firm currently being prosecuted for a ‘serious breach’ of the Data Protection Act for secretly on-selling personal information to around 40 construction companies (among them Taylor Woodrow, Laing O’Rourke and Balfour Beatty), so that said firms could allegedly weed out potential trouble-makers from amongst job applicants.

I’m hardly a card-carrying unionist, but the whole notion of collecting and selling non-consented personal information really must be deplored. As reported by the BBC, The Information Commissioner’s Office believes that some 3,213 workers had details of their personal relationships, trade union activity and employment history traded by The Consulting Association for as low as £2.20 a pop.

I don’t know what’s more offensive from a data protection perspective: The fact that The Consulting Association’s ‘blacklist’ ran for over fifteen years or that the cost of violating workers’ privacy was deemed to be roughly equivalent to the price of eight cans of baked beans.

On another data front, I see Security Minister, Lord West, has announced that there’s no decision yet on the Government’s proposed giant database of phone calls, e-mails and internet use. Richard Thomas is calling for ‘a full democratic debate about where exactly the [data collecting] lines should be drawn’, so it will be interesting to see what happens over coming weeks. Because if you put Jack Straw’s controversial Clause 152 of his Coroners and Justice Bill alongside the Communications Data Bill, a near perfect data protection storm is certainly brewing over Westminster way – one which could impact on all our personal lives.