Data protection: a car boot tale
Posted: Wednesday 23 March 2011
A Barrister has given a formal Undertaking to the Information Commissioner under the Data Protection Act following the loss of sensitive personal data held in client files which were stolen from the boot of her car, which had been left parked in a public street overnight.
Most lawyers will have experienced the challenges of having to lug around heavy files to meetings and the resulting temptation to stash said files "securely" in our cars. However, this story emphasises the point that a car boot isn't a sufficiently secure form of overnight storage, particularily when it is parked on a public street.
Would the outcome have been any different had the file been stolen from the barrister's house? One suspects not, as the undertaking required the Barrister to ensure that data which is stored over night outside the security of Chambers be subject to "appropriate security and kept in a locked storage place". For those who do not have robust home security such as a home safe, it is therefore difficult to see circumstances in which it would be compatible with the seventh data protection principle to keep a hard copy file containing sensitive personal data at home overnight.
