The Data Protection Act Is Not Worth The Paper It Is Written On
...a world of dilemmas. Pros of using it are well known, but there are many cons that diminish them. Some problems appeared in the last few decades and there is an urgent need to introduce legislation devoted to law and social issues taking into consideration this powerful medium. The times when hackers where breaching security systems of large corporations and government institutions just for their personal satisfaction faded into the past. Not only the reasons changed. Despite this, the awareness of utmost importance of this matter, people still don’t seam to realise what it brings. Their beliefs in system reliability combined with producers assurance make it even worse.
The new area with development of computer technology appeared to leadership of illegal activity. The majority of essential information e.g. such which are the trade secret of firm, are kept in electronic figure. In such case the safety of informative system can decide about overall opinion of institution, the position on market, or even about financial fluency. Information can be very attractive for competitive firms, or everyone who is able to use it in order to take advantage of them. Interest allows criminal groups to broaden areas of activity. It is noticeable that information system can not only improve company's operating, but it may become a serious threat.
We can safely estimate that nowadays every company, no matter how big it is, uses internet for marketing or communication purposes. It is closely related with our mentality. Even the best protected software and hardware will not do any good if several basic principles are not followed. Those rules are included in Data Protection Act 1998:
1. Personal data shall be processed fairly and lawfully
2. Personal data shall be obtained only for one or more specified and lawful purposes and shall not be further processed in any...
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