Andrew
In a recent request for e-mails as part of a subject access request, I had
the dilemma of what constituted personal data contained within e-mails.
The person had been an employee and had deleted all of the mail in the
account during the last month of employment.
When I informed the subject that this was the case, the person was
insistent that access to personal e-mails from backed up data was a right.
Advice about reconstituted e-mails and what was personal data was varied.
I took into account the nature of the request. In this case it was an
ex-employee who was threatening to sue the organisation. Regardless of
interpretations of what is personal data , what is disproportionate effort
etc., the bottom line was if the person did sue and gain a court order,
the data would have to be disclosed and it would involve Legal Services
and additional costs to the organisation.
I had the e-mails reconstituted and printed out what was available on the
back up tapes for each month in question. (This was also useful as it
proved that the system worked!) I then went through the painstaking task
of deleting any non personal and third party data from print outs of the
e-mails prior to disclosing them.
In this instance there was a lot of project data in the mails that I took
the view was not personal data, rather it was the intellectual property of
the organisation and not the personal data of the person who created it .
The data subject could not be identified from the data, only from the
e-mail address.
That was several months ago...............If the subject took the response
to the Information Commissioner to complain, I've not received anything yet
to suggest that the actions taken were not acceptable ..... but I suppose
there's still time:-)
Joan Field
Information Security Officer
HBS Service Middlesbrough
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