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I am not a legal expert. I cannot make an authoritative interpretation of it. Nevertheless, like everybody else, I am subject to it. I therefore have to consider it. I can only consider it in terms of what I perceive it to be to the best of my understanding. And this is my best endeavour at perceiving the essence of the Data Protection Act.
Any person or organisation who stores personal information about other individuals on a computer must register under the Act as a keeper of personal data. To register, one has to pay an annual fee which is beyond what most individuals can afford. As a result, only commercial companies and other organisations can afford to register, and therefore hold personal data on a computer legally.
A registered keeper of personal information is required to reveal, to any individual, all the personal information it is holding about him. For a fee, of course. The individual would thus seem to be protected against any private or commercial organisation holding false information about him. However, the initiative must come from the individual. It is up to him to:
To be sure that no organ of society is feeding off false information being held about him, every individual in the country would have to obtain the registry of all keepers of personal information, and then follow the above procedure for each. This is clearly impractical and unaffordable for almost the entire population. It was clearly not the intent of the legislators that the individual should be privy to the vast amounts of personal information about him which is held by an indeterminate number of faceless organisations.
However, the ultimate Orwellian nightmare takes form in the fact that government has exempted itself form the requirements of the Act. Who knows what this could precipitate in the future from within the departments of a government which may be far less benign than what we have today. Nobody can know what erroneous information some obscure and covert government department may be holding on them.
The Act is supposedly to `protect' the individual from having erroneous information on such things as his creditworthiness being propagated throughout the financial world. However, it does not quite work like that, as illustrated by the following scenario which bears essential resemblance to something which actually happened to me.
I am refused credit by a financing company. I ask why. They say that my creditworthiness check has failed. I ask to see the data they are holding about my creditworthiness. Of course I have to pay the access fee for this. They then tell me they do not hold such information. They do credit checks by interrogating a third party database to which they subscribe, and the identity of which they are not allowed to divulge. If I knew who that third party were, I could demand to see the data they are holding about me, but since I don't, I can't. The failure was due to false information being entered about me due to a mix-up between two departments of a large organisation.
A few faceless data barons thus hold all kinds of sensitive information about individuals, who have no practical route to gaining access to their data records. This does not protect the individual from commercial exploitation. It merely helps the commercial establishment to subjugate him even further.
The one concession the Data Protection Act makes is that one is not required to register if the software one is using to store and retrieve the data has no means of selecting individual data records according to personal attributes such as geographic location, gender, race, age, social class. Without such a capability, storing the information on a computer is all but pointless. All database software which one would use for the purpose has built-in selectivity.
When the Act was first passed, I would hear colleagues agonising over whether their computerised Christmas Card lists were subject to it. Since most of their databases provided selectivity on things like geographic area and type of friend or business contact, the data was indeed subject to the Act which many decided to ignore.
I spent 15,000 hours over 8 years developing a marketing database software package. Precision customer targeting was its primary purpose. Consequently it was bristling with selectivity functions. Naturally, it contained information about businesses. Part of this was the name of a person within each business. I remember going into endless speculation as to whether the person's name was personal data or whether is was simply a qualification or attribute of the office that person held within his organisation. In other words, is 'John Smith' personal information or is it simply an adjunct to the office of Managing Director of Acme Services Ltd? After all, it is the Managing Director of Acme Services Ltd that the user of my software is concerned with - be he John Smith, Joe Bloggs, or whoever. The advice I received was that it was a grey area of the law. One may be safe not registering if all personal names referred to employees of a limited liability company as this, as a data subject, had a separate existence in law. But what if the named person is a self-employed trader? Then it is probably personal data. What an absolute pain.
Now, having been unemployed for 10 years, I am far too poor even to consider registration. Consequently and ironically, the computer software I spent an earlier 8 years of my life developing, I am now not even allowed to use - and perhaps not strictly even allowed to possess. Had I been, over this last 10 years, able to hold and process the names and addresses of key contacts in businesses and companies throughout the United Kingdom, then I would probably have been able to find work all by myself the way I used to before the passing of this ridiculous and oppressive piece of legislation.
Before the days of powerful personal computers, governments and large corporates (and those unseen individuals who actually pull the strings) were the only ones with the means to gather, hold and process statistically significant amounts of information. This gave them exclusive power. The personal computer put that power into the hands of the individual, thus removing the establishment's monopoly. Now, because the individual cannot afford the cost and time-consuming bureaucracy of registration, the Data Protection Act has restored that monopoly to the establishment, and the power that goes with it.
The ability to acquire, process and exchange information is vital to human life. The most significant of this information is the knowledge we each hold about other members of our social group or community. It is this information which empowers us to form relationships with our peers. Relationships, in turn, empower us to co-ordinate and direct our energies effectively towards the purposes of life. Indeed, some may say, it is our stored personal knowledge about others which makes us human.
In a natural anthropological community, no artificial means is required to enable each of its members to acquire, process and store all necessary knowledge about all its other members. In the isolation of capitalist suburbia, however, the natural means of human interaction have been severed and destroyed. Artificial means must replace them. People rarely meet face-to-face any more. They mostly do business or seek work by telephone, fax and email. Lacking the immense bandwidth of face-to-face contact, these artificial media of communication need the backup of artificial means of information acquisition, storage and manipulation - in particular the computerised database. Without this, the human individual cannot keep track of so many faceless voices and voiceless verbiage.
In consequence, I hold it to be self-evidently true that the individual has the inalienable right unconditionally to seek, accumulate and hold, any amount and kind of knowledge or information, and to store, process and retrieve that knowledge or information freely and by any means. I hold such knowledge or information, and the means of its preservation, to be an inseparable part of the individual to whom it belongs.
Of course, I am not against specifying restrictions as regards how the individual may use the information he holds. He should not be allowed to use it in acts which violate the basic rights of others. For example, it should not be used in a way which would violate another individual's right to privacy. To this end, the individual should not have licence to release sensitive information on others into the public domain or to other private parties, where to do so could cause harm to the data subject.