HEALTH WARNING: These are my personal views and not the PCT’s – I am also serving out my notice, which might make me demob happy.

 

There are things wrong with the Information Commissioner. They seem to value quantity over quality - I’ve heard lots of ICO people talking about how many cases they close, but the letters I have received from the office in my day job have not been fit for purpose, and required me to work out what the complaint was about. In one case, they had to ring me (very politely) after writing to tell me that there was no complaint against us. Their relationship with the private sector is sometimes too friendly, and their relationship with the public sector is often too blinkered. The Commissioner still does not appear to realise that the reason why they get so many security breaches from the NHS is because the NHS reports them – not because the NHS is any worse at Information Security than anyone else. However, the potential is there, and if they stopped trying to be everyone’s best mate and concentrated on improvement via decisions and enforcement, they’d do better.

 

And on the other hand, Simon Davies is the man who said Phorm was a good idea. He also doesn’t appear to know that the DPA cannot be scrapped because we are members of the EU. We have an imperfect privacy act already – ask Max Mosley. We just need to make the HRA work better for everyone who isn’t rich. The lack of humility in Davies’ article is almost self-parody. Maybe the PI complaints don’t get upheld because they’re trying to get the ICO to do things it can’t do. Maybe Privacy International isn’t always right. Maybe if you want to invite the Deputy PM to a “summit” (it would be a “summit”, not just the meetings that the rest of the world has), you should do so by inviting them, rather than assuming they read your blog. Maybe I should do some work now.

 

Cheers

 

Tim

 

 

https://www.privacyinternational.org/blog/uk-information-commissioners-office-case-justifiable-assisted-suicide