Tim
I agree with you that the ICO's advice is alarming.
I cannot see anything within the Act that would prevent a data subject from
voluntarily limiting the scope of the information that they are asking for under
section 7. The right of access belongs to the data subject, so presumably
they can chose to limit or waive that right!
We often receive SARs where the data subject only requires certain
information that we hold about them - e.g. someone who has been in
extended contact with my organisation over a number of years asked for notes
of one telephone call that she had made to us.
If we had required her to make a full SAR, then we would have had to have
considered disclosure of the full file containing hundreds of documents. This
would have benefited neither herself nor my organisation.
Also - as a public authority, we have an FOIA Publication Scheme and list the
fees that we may charge for information. We list the £10 fee for SARs, but do
not list any fees for voluntarily disclosing data.
In the example above, if the lady's request was not a SAR, would we have
breached our publication scheme (and therefore FOIA) if we had charged her
the £10 fee?
Simon
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