Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Calm Down

Each note relates to the one before. I predicted the bandwagon but not the subject. I should call this thing anti-hysteria rather than common-sense. As with the little notes about urban myths, this is just a case of trying to stay rational in the face of mass delusion.

Of course everybody in the UK has heard of the missing 25 million customer records. It is undoubtedly a very serious and possibly criminal offence.

And as a practitioner of interactive marketing, CRM, one to one marketing, Pepper's Ghosting, whatever we call it, I must know the confines of our national data protection laws and work within them every single day.

But is it cause for mass hysteria? Looking at any individual customer record, was there really anything there that no-one else would ever know? Did the files contain the passwords and PINs to access your bank accounts?

No. Somebody could try to imitate you, but they cannot take anything from you unless some organisation further down the chain screws up badly. We need to watch the banks here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is quite clearly your fault that England lost to Croatia- hang your head in shame.

Anonymous said...

Once the hysteria smoke clears we are left with the real issue, how bad are organisations at looking after personal data or is this just a civil service issue.?
Maybe our approach to DPA enforcement is not working. We have very little inspection unless there is a failure or significant complaints. Mostly big companies worry about embarassment rather than fines etc. so we still find banking details in the waste bins of banks. It's about time the Information Commisioner stopped all marketing from any company where a breach happens until they can convince him that the problem is fixed, that would get some attention !
A fellow marketing IT view.