{"id":1297,"date":"2024-12-22T19:32:36","date_gmt":"2024-12-22T19:32:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/?p=1297"},"modified":"2024-12-22T21:18:31","modified_gmt":"2024-12-22T21:18:31","slug":"the-information-commissioners-office","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/?p=1297","title":{"rendered":"The Information Commissioner’s Office"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) give you the right to request information held about you \u2014 for example, meeting minutes about your promotion, pay, complaints or even just malicious emails naming you. You may be unhappy about how your University has handled your own personal information. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is the last resort when Universities behave recklessly with your data and don\u2019t comply with GDPR.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trustpilot’s reviews of the ICO are shown above. They don’t inspire much confidence. 97 % of those who made a complaint to the ICO rate the service as 1 star (“… illusion of help …. Useless, don’t investigate anything … Communication is very poor, and it seems they do not care … They fail to take data breaches seriously … My MP is now questioning why they take tens of millions in taxpayers’ funding and don\u2019t do anything<\/em> … Not fit for purpose, intentionally<\/em> … Why do they exist. When you advise them of a breach of your personal data, they say you have to deal with the problem<\/em> … All these organisations supposedly there to protect people are just set up to create the impression that there is some form of regulation when there is not<\/em>“). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is entirely consistent with two stories reported to the 21 Group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the first, a Head of Department at a Russell Group university began tracking two members of staff with whom he disagreed.  This involved monitoring the location of the members of staff by inappropriate access to the technical University wifi location logs which record mobile phones. This is a very clear breach of GDPR. An employer cannot track the locations of an employee unless the employee has given permission. In this instance, the matter was worse. The Head of Department was engaged in a bullying campaign against the employees and so was motivated by malice. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ICO responded thus<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A slap on the wrist for the university! Of course, the Head of Department suffered no ill effects for what would be a sackable offence in many professions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second example concerned material provided to candidates interviewing for a job as Human Resources (HR) Manager at the same Russell Group university. The candidates were asked to study interview materials for 30 minutes before answering questions. Extraordinarily, the materials were a thinly disguised description of an ongoing grievance raised by a number of individuals with the HR department. This material is confidential. Its use in a job interview process is unprofessional. Its use is legally improper, as the matter is under purview of a forthcoming Employment Tribunal. One of the interview candidates recognised the situation and forwarded the material to the individuals involved. Hence, any anonymisation was not done properly, as the individuals were readily identifiable to candidates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ICO responded thus<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Here the ICO swallowed everything the University told it — which does not seem to be accurate. The most important error is that it is not a “previous real life case<\/em>“. It is an ongoing real life case both in the university and in the Employment Tribunals. The ICO’s letter ends with another flick on the wrist for the university, though no individuals in HR are ever reprimanded or held to account.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Universities say they take bullying and harassment seriously. It should be obvious — but apparently it is not. So let’s spell it out. Individuals will be reluctant to raise Grievances with a HR department which recycles confidential matter into interview material and is then distributed to random job applicants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) give you the right to request information held about you \u2014 for example, meeting minutes about your promotion, pay, complaints or even just malicious emails naming you. You may be unhappy about how your University has handled your own personal information. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1297"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1297\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1317,"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1297\/revisions\/1317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}