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I don’t know what crossed your mind a few weeks ago when you heard about the recent UK big data breaches. On the Monday was a loss of millions of names from the UK Electoral Roll. 40 million voters in fact from hackers - Full article here. I suppose that does make a difference for our government to not be trying to be selling it this time!
A few days later came the PSNI data breach, of every serving police officer in Northern Ireland. - Full article here.
The day after that came Norfolk and Suffolk police, fessing up over another data breach consisting of personal details of 1,230 victims, suspects and witnesses - Full article here
While the first one was apparently a successful hack attempt, (we are familiar with some of those in social housing), the second two look more like spectacular own-goals, that would have needed Mary Earps England’s ‘Queen of Stops’ to try to effectively prevent. These were both cases where the police authorities apparently responded to freedom of information (FOI) requests, for summary data. IE number of cases, totals of police staff and roles etc.
They say a little knowledge is dangerous and that would certainly be true if that data was extracted into Excel perhaps (a tool we all love a little too much), and a pivot table/formulas created for creating the summary totals. To be compliant with a FOI request they could have easily supplied a short PDF of the totals page. To share way too much data we could provide the much bigger spreadsheet and inadvertently and criminally overshare.
In the case of the PSNI data breach, it could not have been much worse a mistake.
I have worked a lot over in Northern and Southern Ireland over the last 25 years. When I first traveled there, they had barely dismantled the British army checkpoints outside Belfast international airport. I have 100% always had positive and uplifting experiences with all sides of the communities I have worked with and received care and generosity throughout. Belfast and other places have improved immensely. Offices and property blocks have plate glass on the outside again and hen parties cycle around city centres on big beer/gin bikes. Its one of my favourite corners of these isles.
One institution in society that still polarises there is the PSNI. Once called the RUC reflecting just one part of society, its new incarnation is still extremely suspicious to both communities, nearly 22 years on:
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| Loyalist community suspicion |
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| Republican community suspicion |
In terms of putting people at risk and drastic effect on safety, over twenty thousand ordinary people doing some very dangerous jobs have been put in even more danger. Perhaps all down to lax training of admin staff on GDPR, our responsibilities to it and how they are to use software tools handling our data.
It wouldn’t be the first time I have encountered organisations doing a well meaning GDPR induction, yet with no practical advice of how and where to store data and the importance of it being accurate, succinct, consistant and well controlled. Its probably the subject of another future post or two, but we do give staff tools such as Excel and barely train them on it (if at all). No wonder they try to use it like a database and have no idea what they might inadvertently share using it. With such lack of knowledge, staff should be banned from using the common off the shelf excuse, “I cant do that due to data protection!”.
So, could these last two types of gaffs happen easily in your organisations?
How well do you induct and keep all staff aware of GDPR?
How do you induct staff on how your systems and storage needs to be used consistently for good data hygiene?
How well do you control information access and controlled release, particularly of sensitive data?
If you have any doubts on the above, please take action right now, before your organisation makes some rooky mistakes and we can all watch its gory details examined on Newsnight and Sky News.
If you are struggling with getting your GDPR in order, or replacing spreadsheets with systems or databases, just get in touch with us.
Subscribe to our blog here on this link, to always catch the latest news on whats happening in the sector.
Related Post: Thoughts on getting Right To Forget right
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Audioweb – Policeman Skank.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009
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