The Information Commissioner's Office has served an enforcement notice on b4usearch.com ordering it to stop using pre-2002 electoral roll information, in breach of the Data Protection Act 1998 (see story on Kablenet).
Anyone eligible to vote in the UK is required to provide their name and address to their local council. Prior to 2002, local councils were able to sell all of this data. However, electoral roll data has been treated differently following a complaint by retired accountant Brian Robertson against his local council, the City of Wakefield Metropolitan District Council (see the resultant legislation here).
UK readers with an eye for small print may have noticed that you can now object to electoral roll data being used for marketing purposes and an edited register is produced including only those folk who are happy for their data to be used for marketing purposes - surprisingly many people still wish to be on the marketing list.
The ICO has received some 1600 complaints from people unhappy about the use of their personal electoral roll data by b4usearch.com. The ICO has found that "damage or distress to individuals is likely to have been caused by information being processed in this way". Damages can be awarded under the Data Protection Act and the Human Rights Act for privacy breaches.
The deadline for compliance with the enforcement notice has not been published by the ICO, but b4usearch.com may of course decide to appeal against the ruling.
The UK Data Protection legislation implements EU legislation that itself articulates broader international Human Rights law - essentially article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights protecting privacy. EU member states are given some degree of freedom to decide how the law is enforced and what the penalties will be for non-compliance. The EU has already expressed concerns at lenient enforcement of the legislation in the UK compared to other member states. It would be interesting to see how the b4usearch.com issue would have been dealt with in other countires where fines are apparently more common for invasion of privacy.
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