Intellectual Property Law

Data protection - more signs of unrest

More today on the increasingly militant climate on data protection - this time, says the Times online, it's MP's calling for tougher, criminal sanctions for breaches of data security - like the recent debacle at HMRC.

What's that, you cry - our MP's calling for penalties which could be applied to them if they ever attain ministerial rank ? How noble, though cynics may ask whether these are the same MP's who recently claimed credit for the Freedom of Information Act while seeking to exempt themselves from its more tiresome provisions.

We should not perhaps get too excited - the call for tougher penalties came from the Commons Justice Committee, a cross-party group chaired by Liberal Democrat Alan Beith. Still smarting from the embrassment of both the HMRC affair and its failures to "understand" its own legislation on party funding, HMG is perhaps unlikely to embrace any radical changes to the data protection regime just at the moment.

Full post as published by IMPACT on January 03, 2008 (boomark / email).