I'm trying to find out what the consensus is regarding the status of emails within the Data Protection Act. There's some inconsistency. The Bristol University Secretary's website says: "you should treat an email as you would a letter".
http://www.bris.ac.uk/secretary/dataprotection/emails
But I'm finding that emails are, on a widespread basis, being deleted from local desktop computers and an organisation's servers where they could easily be found if a Data Subject asks to see them. They are being transferred to a magnetic tape based archive, from which they cannot - not easily anyway - be recovered using a search term. I could ask what is the point of storing any data this way if the medium cannot be searched? Can, or does, the whole digital tape have to be reloaded onto a server and then the data searched?
Printed correspondence is not handled like this is it?
What is the latest guidance from the Information Commissioner's Office - does anyone have this to hand? I'm waiting for a word from them.
Emails are a very widely used means of corresponding - far more than printed snail mail letters these days - if they don't fully qualify as a kind of personal data subject information - shouldn't they? And shouldn't the internal data management systems of organisations reflect this and ensure that all emails referring to an individual be easily recoverable when requested in the same way as hard copy correspondence must be?
Are there views on this in the Data Protection community?
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