OVER 300 complaints were made to the Personal Data Commissioner last year, mainly concerning the disclosure of personal data through spamming, the commissioner’s annual report said.
Spam, including fax and email, but especially to mobile phones is on the increase according to the report. It said that 254 of the complaints last year were spam-related compared to 175 in 2008, a 32 per cent increase.
A law established in 2004, the Regulation of Electronic Communications and Postal Services, states that messages to market a product are only allowed to be sent to subscribers who have already consented to it.
Many of the messages sent concerned gambling, dating and astrology. In some cases, such as shops and restaurants, they did not realise that they were in fact breaking the law and stopped sending SMS messages immediately to people who were not actually customers.
Fines of up to €8,000 can be imposed on those sending SMS messages to people without their consent. One such case occurred in 2009 against a person who was sending SMS messages about betting to people without their permission.
A number of complaints were also made about the photocopying of identity cards. One of the cases that the Commissioner had to deal with was a particular telecommunications provider who was photocopying prospective customers’ identity cards to open them an account. Apparently it was in order to confirm their identities. However the Commissioner decided that an identity card reveals more information than necessary to open an account and that all that was needed was to show the card. All the identity card photocopies on file were destroyed.
The Department of Lands and Surveys came under fire for disclosing people’s personal information. A complaint was submitted by a woman claiming that the department had revealed information about her, without her consent, to her ex-husband’s lawyer to be used during a court procedure.
According to the Immovable Property Law the director of the department can access the files and then a lawyer acting on behalf of a client, may use this in a court proceeding. In this case the Commissioner decided that the purpose of the processing should have been revealed but that legal proceedings before the court were not a good enough reason for taking and using the information.
Other than spam, unlawful disclosure and excessive data, which are the top complaints after spam, grievances were reported about confidentiality, CCTV and voice recording, monitoring at work and biometric data.
