What is it about?
Document redaction has become increasingly important for individuals and organizations. We have used particular form of ‘survey’ methodology, namely that we used Freedom of Information (FOI) as a means for exploring public-sector information redaction practices in order to determine if they adequately protect personal information.
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Why is it important?
Our findings suggest that nearly all UK Public Authorities do not comply with the GDPR (or the UK Data Protection Act (2018)). This is remarkable and worrying in equal measure. One of the underlying issues was the heterogeneity of approaches expressed within that policy material which existed, which in turn arose from the inadequacy of existing official guidance. We also consider the public policy implications of this set of circumstances, which suggest more systematic failures to implement the GDPR in the UK on the ground.
Perspectives
This paper is the first work to audit differenct public organizations redaction practices at organizational level, we hope that we can explore further redaction practices within public authorities directly with information governance professionals, to understand why most public authorities do not appear to have appropriate practices in place. It would also be worth directly investigating FOI or SAR responses from these organizations, to understand how frequently redaction errors are made, and thus how much of an impact the concerning practices we identified have an effect on the ground.
Yijun Chen
Monash University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Exploring How UK Public Authorities Use Redaction to Protect Personal Information, ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems, March 2024, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3651989.
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