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The Children's Society has recently initiated a Data Protection Audit and as a result several members of staff within the organisation have already raised some significant issues. One major concern is about the anonymisation of data (Trevor Field has also recently raised this issue in his email 'Third Party Agreements'); questions have arisen regarding the use of sensitive personal data extracted from existing care files concerning children and young people. These files are created by the organisation's social work projects to document the work undertaken with these individuals. While the Society has an ethical policy of only releasing identifiable personal care data to professional parties involved in a case, the organisation's PR department often asks social work staff to provide anonymised factual information about children and young people for use as case study material in the context of research projects, advertising campaigns or for public relations purposes. Given this, would list members have views regarding the operation of the Data Protection Act for this practice: a) Is the anonymisation of such data sufficient to permit its use? Do we have to obtain the consent of the data subject before doing this? The use of personal data, extracted from care files, for case studies and research is often an ad hoc procedure: it is not known at the point of collection that the data will be used for these purposes. Would consent need to be obtained from the data subject at the point of collection 'on the off-chance' that the data may be used in an anonymised version at a later date, maybe years down the line? b) Would the amalgamation of data extracted from several data files and the creation of an anonymous 'fictional' data subject be an acceptable way of ensuring anonymity for each individual? c) An added problem here is that often the cases are harrowing, dramatic and involve various people, over and above the data subject (e.g. relations, friends) . Even if a case is anonymised what is the situation regarding these third parties? What if they recognise the events described in the case study as being the one they were involved in and raise a complaint? Does this have consent or use of data implications? Feedback on any of these questions would be greatly appreciated. Philippa Ireland, Data Protection Assistant, & Ian Wakeling, Records Manager and Archivist The Children's Society Records and Archive Centre tel: 020 7232 2966; fax: 020 7252 3902 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%