On Fri, Jul 14, 2006 at 02:19:49PM +0100, Antoinette Carter wrote:
> Less waste = less cost = better society.
> Now there's a Friday afternoon belter if ever I saw one!
I wouldn't agree that making an SAR, or dealing with one, is "waste". That
seems to be an axiom of your argument though, so I doubt we're going to
be able to find much agreement on the follow-ons!
I don't think I agree either that "less cost = better society". I'm
certainly all for smaller government, but I'm not sure I'm ready to get
rid of it completely! :)
I agree that less waste = better society, but eliminating costs randomly
wouldn't really be a good thing. You need to reduce the correct costs,
and I don't think that DP and/or FOI costs are the right ones to
minimise, per se.
My equation looks more like:
More transparency = more openness = better society
> I can understand why you might not mind wasting some of Tesco's huge
> corporate profit
In Tesco's case I wouldn't be surprised if they'd gotten it down to not
even running at a loss at all. They've probably got the human time down
to a minimum, but I guess the volume of information they store means
the paper, printing & postage bill would probably eat up most of the
tenner! (I'm not sure if the "it costs more than 10 pounds to handle a
10 pound cheque would apply here either as presumably Tesco handle many
thousands of cheques a day anyway).
> but bombard your local council with unnecessary DSARs
> and your council tax will go up; as will your neighbours'. Is that
> really a good thing?
I've never actually made an SAR from my council (perhaps I should -
might be interesting!), just lots of FOI requests, and I believe that
the long term effects of open government outweigh any short-term costs
that may be incurred whilst trying to get there...
Tony
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
All archives of messages are stored permanently and are
available to the world wide web community at large at
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/data-protection.html
If you wish to leave this list please send the command
leave data-protection to [log in to unmask]
All user commands can be found at : -
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/help/commandref.htm
Any queries about sending or receiving message please send to the list owner
[log in to unmask]
(all commands go to [log in to unmask] not the list please)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
