Learning the Data Protection Act - and Fixing the World

I’m in the process of re-becoming a member of staff at Hull University. Things have changed a bit since I started. For one of the jobs I started back in the day the induction consisted of “Welcome to the department Rob. You’re giving the second year networking course. It starts next term”. Actually, I may be being a little unfair here. I think I did get sent on a DEC VMS system management course too.

Anyhoo, nowadays employers are much keener to make sure you know stuff. I’ve had to do seven training courses about things I thought I knew everything about but it turned out I didn’t. Today I did my Data Protection training. I knew a bit already, but what impressed me about this stuff was that people have sat down and thought about the implications of data breaches and what constitutes good behaviour by those holding data. Then they’ve made some sensible, enforceable, rules.

Now, if we can only make it illegal for companies to collect data about us when we publish things, and illegal use collected data to recommend other things, we might be on our way out of our current mess…..