This news from a day or two ago was shared with me by a friend and regular reader who knew that this kind of article would prompt a blog post.
http://metro.co.uk/2013/03/19/anger-as-birmingham-city-councils-wheelie-bin-audit-asks-homeowners-are-you-gay-3548754/
Just in case you don’t follow the link, the piece is about a wheelie bin survey carried out by Birmingham City Council (BCC) that included a random and completely unnecessary question about the respondent’s sexual orientation.
Unsurprisingly the news coverage is amusing and derisory and justifiably so.
Now Birmingham is a city I have some affection for given that I lived and worked in Brum for many years and I bought my first house there. I don’t want to mock the local authority in the way that the Metro does but I am concerned about this survey from a data capture perspective.
As a database manager, I have lived with the Data Protection Act (DPA), and the need for compliancy with it, for many years; in simple terms data needs to be accurate, up to date, relevant for the purpose it has been gathered for and securely stored.
By way of illustration, in my last job role (utilising the Siebel On Demand system), we didn’t use the database to record the birthdays of our customers or the names of their wives and children. Those details could be useful for a salesperson building and maintaining a relationship but they weren’t relevant to our business and weren’t therefore collected/recorded.
In BCC’s case, I can think of absolutely no relevance for the collection of sexual orientation data in conjunction with a survey about bins! Assuming that the data captured is being recorded in a database in some way (and that the responses aren’t anonymous) then I think that the council is at risk of attracting the wrong kind of attention from the custodians of the DPA. Assuming that BCC has an internal data protection official (and businesses when they register, need to have a nominated officer), that person might want to study this survey because there’s negative publicity (like the Metro article) and then there’s really negative publicity.
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http://metro.co.uk/2013/03/19/anger-as-birmingham-city-councils-wheelie-bin-audit-asks-homeowners-are-you-gay-3548754/
Just in case you don’t follow the link, the piece is about a wheelie bin survey carried out by Birmingham City Council (BCC) that included a random and completely unnecessary question about the respondent’s sexual orientation.
Unsurprisingly the news coverage is amusing and derisory and justifiably so.
Now Birmingham is a city I have some affection for given that I lived and worked in Brum for many years and I bought my first house there. I don’t want to mock the local authority in the way that the Metro does but I am concerned about this survey from a data capture perspective.
As a database manager, I have lived with the Data Protection Act (DPA), and the need for compliancy with it, for many years; in simple terms data needs to be accurate, up to date, relevant for the purpose it has been gathered for and securely stored.
By way of illustration, in my last job role (utilising the Siebel On Demand system), we didn’t use the database to record the birthdays of our customers or the names of their wives and children. Those details could be useful for a salesperson building and maintaining a relationship but they weren’t relevant to our business and weren’t therefore collected/recorded.
In BCC’s case, I can think of absolutely no relevance for the collection of sexual orientation data in conjunction with a survey about bins! Assuming that the data captured is being recorded in a database in some way (and that the responses aren’t anonymous) then I think that the council is at risk of attracting the wrong kind of attention from the custodians of the DPA. Assuming that BCC has an internal data protection official (and businesses when they register, need to have a nominated officer), that person might want to study this survey because there’s negative publicity (like the Metro article) and then there’s really negative publicity.
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