The Human Factor

There are some pretty thankless jobs out there, several of which we at Data Grub have experienced directly. And, while it can't match the indignity of chicken sexing or the sheer slog of meter reading, working in a bank comes pretty high up the list of crap jobs.

(Obviously, we're talking about working behind the counter of a high street retail bank. The "master of the universe" type banking jobs - with its private jets, champagne, corporate boxes and complete lack of conscience - sounds quite a laugh.)

What's so bad about working in a bank? Well, aside from the constant pressure to sell massive amounts of debt to the sort of people who shouldn't be trusted with real cutlery, there's also the Data Protection Act to deal with. Banks workers have to watch an achingly-bad training video - which looked dated when it was made in 1998 - about the Act, and how to stay on the right side of the law with regards to customers' data.

No doubt this is a video that'll get dusted down and rewatched by the staff of HSBC, after the bank was fined a mammoth £3 million by the FSA yesterday for taking a laughably cavalier attitude towards customers' personal data.

Another depressingly familiar story of data loss, sure, but it did remind us of that lame old video, in which a harrassed data protection officer pours out his worries about the new Act to a psychiatrist. At one point, the shrink tries to calm him down by saying: "It's really just a matter of common sense."

Quite. Unfortunately, the global supply of common sense has been waning since around 1860, and it's currently rarer than platinum.

But ultimately, it's humans who have the biggest bearing on whether a company successfully fulfills its data protection requirement. With all the talk of encryption, virtual private networks, network and site security, it's easy to forget that technology is only as useful as the human operating it - or forgetting to. Organisations spend time and money communicating their privacy policies; here at Data Grub we'd like to see organisations showing exactly what steps they are taking to ensure that their employees are following best practice at all times. People as a rule are pretty stupid, but when there's a corporate culture of sound data protection processes this cuts regrettable incidents to a minimum. And, with data loss stories in the media almost every week, there's also a business case for having a public and comprehensive data protection policy, in the same way as firms boast about their CSR credentials.