Ethics & Law of Information

A category dealing with the ethics and legalities of the management of Information and Information Quality.

Fair use/Specified purpose and the IBTS

I am a blood donor. I am proud of it. I have provided quite a lot of sensitive personal data to the IBTS over the years that I’ve been donating. The specific purposes for which I believed I was providing the information was to allow the IBTS to administer communications with me as a donor …

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Irish Blood Transfusion Service loses data..

Why is it that people never learn? Only months after the debacle of HMRC sending millions of records of live confidential data whizzing around in the post on 2 CDs (or DVDs), the Irish Blood Transfusion Service (IBTS) has had 171,000 records of blood tests and blood donors stolen. The data was on a laptop …

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Facebook & Data Protection

The Younger McGarr (Simon that is) has a very detailed and well written post on the data protection issues that arise (and seemingly are ignored) by Facebook. It can be found over at the McGarr Solicitors website. He has already picked up some complimentary comments, including one from Thomas Otter (who has written on these …

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What the…? – Irish Political coverage ignores the Elephant in the room

I’m frankly baffled. We are in the run up to a General Election here in Ireland. All the media pundits are quoting 24th May as the date of the (as yet unannounced) election. This would require our parliament to be dissolved at the latest next week. Ireland runs a Proportional Representation/Single Transferable Vote system. It …

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An idea pinched from Tuppenceworth

Tuppenceworth have started doing ‘Tag Clouds’ to visualise the frequency of words etc in political manifestos and speeches in the run up to the Irish General Election. Ho-hum I thought… wouldn’t it be interesting to do the same on the emerging commercial Information Quality Blogs (and perhaps other commentary in the area – it works …

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The Tuppenceworth Paper Round (a slight return)

Oh good grief, Hendrix is probably spinning in his grave… Simon over at Tuppenceworth has announced he’s been invited to take part in Leviathan this Thursday. This is a nice ‘attaboy’ for the gang at Tuppenceworth from David McWilliams et al. Or else it is a trap given the number of journos who’ll be in …

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Customer focus in the mee-ja

The PaperRound over at Tuppenceworth has stirred up a hornet’s nest of phlegm and brimstone from at least two sources – the Indo article by Niall Byrne that I mentioned previously and a mysterious comment from ‘Soontobe’ on the Tuppenceworth Blog. The team over at Tupp’worth may take issue with my view that the Paper …

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Tuppenceworth…

Simon over at Tuppenceworth is getting a bee in his bonnet about the standard of Irish journalism. I have to agree. I am a Director of publicity for an international association for Information Quality professionals. Over the past year I have submitted a number of commentaries on issues such as the Electoral Register. Not ONCE …

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Propogation of information errors and the risks of using surrogate sources

….ye wha’? There has been a lot written in relation to the electoral register and other matters about using information from other sources to improve the quality of information that you have or to create a new set of information. This makes sense, other people may already have done much of the work for you …

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Conflict of Expectations

A few weeks back, I was at dinner with Larry English and some people from a large consulting firm. It was a social occasion and as the food and informality took hold, the discussion turned to the pillars of the Total Information Quality Management methodology and ethical/moral concerns. Mr English draws heavily on Deming and the …

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