The DOBlog

For Feck’s Sake Irish Water, I’ve got a day job…

Written by

Daragh

in

Stopped to take a breather for lunch. Saw this from TJ McIntyre (a man who knows his onions when it comes to Data Protection and Privacy).

I’ve covered off the issues with the marketing consents for Irish Water on my company site.  The total confusion here effectively makes any implied or explicit consent for marketing open to challenge on the grounds that it was not unambiguous. Irish Water need to step up, stop faffing around, and fix this. It is a total disaster and it is getting in the way of me doing my real job. Also, the consent Irish Water are relying on isn’t Opt-In, its Opt-out.

I’m not against Water Charges, I’m against what I see as an inevitable waste of 10%-35% of turnover in Irish Water due to poor data quality management, leading to manual work arounds and scrap and rework, and I’m against approaches to obtaining and processing personal data that frankly seem to be oblivious to the national and EU legislation that should be governing that processing.

I’m against €82.4 million being spent on consultants who don’t seem to know how to approach this kind of project correctly given the gaping issues that exist in a data management context. And I’m against me having to be the paramilitary wing of the Data Protection Commissioner’s office asking key questions in public the day before it all kicks off that should have been addressed in private months ago during the design phase. And I’m against any absence of accountability or stewardship over critical data. That just irks me.

I’ve got a day job and clients to serve. conferences to prepare keynote presentations and tutorials for, and a conference of my own to run. The mental exercise of analysing Irish Water was fun, but frankly it’s like shooting fish in an over-engineered under-designed barrel at this point.

So, for all the Irish Water people reading this:

  1. Please come to IGQIE2014 in November. You will learn something you really need to know
  2. Ask you boss if you can hire my company to help you figure this stuff out. We’re pretty good at it. And we’ve got friends who are good at the bits we’re not good on. We will be a rounding error on €82.4 million.
  3. Please try to stop screwing up on your data management and data protection issues quite so publicly because when people ask me about a think I’m wired to look at it and figure it out. They find me on twitter and look to me for answers, and I feel obliged to try to help explain because you are doing such a crappy job of it. This stuff made me trend for Ireland. I hate trending for Ireland.

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