Randy plods plundered police records just to get a date Checking out women "for sexual purposes" was just one of the ways Welsh police have breached people's data protection rights. Having all that knowledge at their fingertips proved too much for some in Wales' four police forces, leading to 85 recorded breaches since 2006, the BBC found out in a Freedom of Information request. …
However, i DONT admire how they flout the law. Assumiong they,as moral bastions, have an automatic right to pry.
Sorry, but thats a big no-no.
However, no doubt the ICO will spit fire (well, steam at most) and we will all end up back where we started..
As part of their job they have to access such information. It's part of how they detect crimes and solve them.
This shows that the checks and auditing built into the system is working.
What more can the system do? do you really want more red tape in the system? forms completed in triplicate before each access to the database?
No it does not show they are working.
It shows that some individuals have been caught. It does not indicate the scale of the problem, it does not demonstrate what fraction of probable violations have been identified.
It is this sort of wooly thinking that allows organisations to make use of a few cases to 'demonstrate' they are doing something and pull the proverbial over everyones eyes.
If you think that a minority of police looking up people's details on their database is corruption, then police in this country must be doing pretty well. Look around the rest of the world and at what they call police corruption.
No, it's not right, but it is found out, reported and the people involved are disciplined.
I imagine it is likely that a copper would also get sacked if their partner or housemate turned out to be a criminal. So, some method of them doing background checks would seem reasonable. I suppose they could ask their potential partners/housemates to apply for their own CRB checks, but it'd hardly be a great start to a trusting relationship, eh?
I don't know whether knowing someone with a criminal record is a sackable offence, but knowing someone who should get a criminal record seems to require action as part of the job.
What I really found curious is that you thought not asking a potential partner to do a CRB check because you'd done one behind their backs was a good start to a trusting relationship.
They just don't know (yet) that they don't have a trusting relationship.
Of course you can apply for your own CRB check:
- http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Startinganewjob/DG_195811
@The other down-voters: My bad for daring to suggest that the Police might have more of a need to check the background of potential partners than the rest of us. Obviously I was wrong. I guess when everything is on Facebook such checks will be unnecessary anyhow.
is the phrase 'recorded'. In common with many public sector datasets (the NHS for example), policing records in the UK are notoriously leaky, a combination of (some) technology limitations but more frequently because of process limitations (the frequent sharing of IDs and the ability for even a relatively naiive officer to hide requests - especially when mass enquiries are being run). A philospohical AND technical rethink is required if this is to be really tacked.
Plod /are/ human (obligatory *cough* but anyway). This is only those they've caught. And that's where they have a department to ferret out this sort of thing. Which is not the case in commercial outfits, where instead they have pressure to monetize all that lovely data. And it points to a fundamental weakness in data hoarding: If you have it, it'll get used, this way or that way.
We really need better ways to "not-store" sensitive data, along with ever improving access and audit controls.
"As someone with a teenaged daughter, I have to admit that I felt a definite burst of empathy when I read that.
I don't condone it, of course, but... can certainly understand it!"
Because you fancy your daughter's girlfriends? Probably not what you meant but you see there are divers possibilities.
Only politicians *ever* seem surprised at this.
It's an abuse of *trust* which (no matter how much they hate to admit) the public have to have in the police for them to do their job.
Now suppose one of those police persons was actually more of a rapist and looking for people with a history of (say) drink offenses and were viewed as an unreliable witness, or as their attacker would view them "perfect" victims. Note I've made no comment on the gender of the attacker or the potential victim.
BTW North Wales has a fairly extensive history of sex offenses against boys in council care homes.
None of them got investigate until *very* late in the day.
How do you detect that someone has misused an information system containing personal details.
If you date someone who has a "Security" role, you will have your background checked as soon as the relationship is declared. If your past is seriously dodgy then your partner will be asked to choose between you and their job.
For those that have access to the systems, they are going to check you first, to save problems further down the line, not least being hurt. It's natural.
So if you check out a girlfriend, or have a mate do it for you, you actually won't get caught, as how do you determine a single lookup is wrong, without having someone vet every single lookup. The people who do get caught are those who systematically abuse the system with frequent lookups, or those who are stupid enough to admit they checked out their partner, and then dump them.
To actually police these systems to the level some seem to feel appropriate would take a huge amount of effort, and you probably wouldn't have any Police officers left. You only want to catch those misusing for criminally or fincially corrpt reasons, oh and those who use it as eHarmoney for cops.
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