Does the Data Protection Act Apply to Me?
This might seem an obvious questions. however, the Act applies to a particular activity - processing personal date - rather than to a particular person or organisation. so if you process personla data then you must comply with the act and in particular you must hadle the personal data in accordance with the data protection principles. Broadly, however if you collect or hold personal data about an indentifiable living individual or if you use, disclose, retain or destroy that information, you are likely to be processing personal data. The scope of the Data Protection Act is therefore very wide as it applies to just about everything you might do with an individual’s personal details. People seem to forget the importance of this says a spokesperson for Locksmiths Liverpool company.
If you re processing personal data you usually have to notify the Information Commissioner about this. Failure to notify is a criminal offence. Something that most one man band businesses are unaware of says the owner of Locksmiths Liverpool Company.
Notification is how an organisation informs the ICO of certain details about it’s prcessing of personal data. The Information Commissioner is required to maintain a register and we use these details to make an entry in the register describing the process. The register is available to the public for inspection.
The main purpose of notification and the public register is transparency and openness. It is a basic principle of data protection and that the public should know (or be able to find out) who is processing personal data, plus other details about processing (such as why it is being carried out). The act provides an exemption from notification for some organisations. Locksmiths are certainly not expent and shouldn’t be says a Liverpool Locksmith.
