During a visit to a dentists today, I was required to complete an A4
sized questionnaire, which was completely full with questions about
sensitive personal data items, as well as family medical history, all
on the surface more suitable to a doctors than a dentists. A similar
questionnaire had previously been filled in some time ago, so this from
memory was a more detailed update. (I did not question the original as
I considered it one of those things the organisation would grow out
of).
When out of interest I questioned the purpose the data was required
for I was informed they were for safety reasons and that the data was
stored in hard copy (with the patients name printed on the sheet, in
the patient record) for 7 years (for legal reasons). (Further
computerisation was an ongoing project.) I did not enquire further as
the people I was speaking to illustrated little knowledge of the data
protection issues and seemed more concerned that I had been upset by
particular questions and wanted to know which ones!
1. Has health and safety advice changed in the last few years
regarding precautions rather than a blanket information collection for
health and safety issues?
2. Where data is collected for one purpose and then retained for a
legal purpose (i.e. the purpose changes after a short period) do the
rules applied to that data change to reflect that secondary/now-primary
purpose? I am thinking here of the function creep which inevitably
seems to follow from collections of data held by large corporate
chains, as means of generating income, whilst changing the cost centre
to the legal department for storage etc would perhaps create rather
more insight into the numbers of people affected. (Although there are
potentially serious confidentiality problems in such a blanket transfer
of data to a separate area of an organisation, those problems
themselves could be used to further illustrate the logical DP legal
issues.)
Ian W
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