Monday 7 January 2008

Data Loss: Clarkson provides useful service.

Jeremy Clarkson, the driving man's First Amongst Equals, winged recenly about the fuss caused by the data loss fiasco and wanted to prove that it was all unfounded by publishing his details in The Sun.

He has had the hairies to come back and say he was wrong after all, as some wag had set up a £500pcm direct debit to the charity Diabetes UK on his account...

What is extraordinary is that the Bank is refusing to divulge the details of the person who set up the DD, citing "data protection". Hold on, the person commited a criminal act, theft, and the Bank is being coy?

Can anyone show if the Bank is allowed or forced to do this?

2 comments:

namf said...

"The bank cannot find out who did this because of the Data Protection Act and they cannot stop it from happening again."

If the bank knew that it was not Clarkson, they would not have permitted the direct debit to be processed.

In order to find out who the person was, they would require access to data that they did not possess (for example, telephone logs, ISP logs, postal receipts - all depending on the method the fraudster used to perpetrate the crime). This is a privilege enjoyed by the police (and some other government agencies), not by banks.

Preventing a re-occurrence of the payment is trivial, and merely requires a letter from Clarkson. Preventing further such fraud is as easy as a phone call.

I fail to see how the Data Protection Act is at all relevant.

James Higham said...

Is data loss related to hair loss?