What is data protection?
Data protection is exactly what it says on the tin, protection of your data. When a company offers a service or provides a good, often it needs some of your personal data to process a transaction or for the service itself. Data protection is how we, as stewards of this information, safely use, store and delete this information so that there are no leaks or stealing of your personal information.
Background
We work with the public to help deliver community based rainwater management schemes, helping to tackle surface water flooding and sewer spills. Projects might involve asking participants whether they've experienced flooding, contacting them to arrange installations, and even visiting their houses to install rainwater capture devices.
This gives us both a legal and moral responsibility to handle their data appropriately and ensure we always honour their rights.
This might sound simple, but it's not.
It raises many questions, like:
- When and how will you delete householder data?
- What exactly are you collecting, and why?
- What exactly will you do with it?
- Will you share any part of it with anyone?
- How will you collect, transmit, and store it securely?
- Have you explicitly communicated this to the data subject in advance and recorded their informed consent?
It seems complex, but data protection is there for a reason, such as protection from fraud and even cybercrimes
Risks
We've seen too many occasions where this has been done badly. Lists of names and addresses on paper left lying around, privacy policies that don't have nearly enough detail to be legal, and even sign-up forms where the data subject is asked to agree to a privacy policy that they can't read because the link doesn't work.
It's not just small organisations getting this wrong.
We've seen national consultancy firms, government departments, and big water companies make simple mistakes - sharing contact details by CC'ing email recipients, collecting data that's not on their privacy policy, and failing to destroy data after the specified time.
This presents huge risks to reputation, operation, and legalities.
Success stories
There are no shortcuts when it comes to data protection.
We have a huge amount of experience handling data protection issues - evidence of success across a wide range of projects for a huge variety of stakeholders, including water companies, innovation projects, schools, and community groups. On these projects we have handled our customers' and stakeholders' data with the utmost care, just as we would expect ours to be dealt with.
How do we achieve this?
We have compliance built-in to our platform - every scheme requires a privacy policy, and data subject consent is recorded with every sign up.
We draw up Data Sharing Agreements as standard for all of our schemes, to ensure that all stakeholders are on the same page and know what they can do with any personal data generated by the scheme.
We regularly review our methods and ensure we are up to date on the latest guidance.
Taking these steps reduces complaints and improves participation rates (people sign up when they trust how you’ll use their data)