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The Accidental Data Controller

It happened a few months back.

Facebook (that hideous, grunt-cheering, dumb-arse cesspit of a privacy clusterfuck–but let me try and remain objective) started to put some rather strange suggestions for new “friends” up on the top right. People who weren’t unknown to me, exactly, but whose electronic link to me could only have been derived in one way.

From email addresses.

These were people who I may once, ever, have emailed. Or who had emailed me, maybe just the once.

And this latter angle got me worried.

Because I know I have never, ever pressed that “find my friends by pillaging my address book” button. Not in Facebook; not in any other service.

And anyway, some of those names weren’t in my address book anyway. But mine must have been in someone else’s… And I started to whiff a potentially horrible thing. However, this being Facebook, and Facebook being full of horrible things, I tucked it into a mental back drawer and let it go. That time.

Then, last week, I got another email invite to some new whizzy networking service. The invite came from someone I’ve got a lot of time for, so I figured there’d be no harm in signing up and having a quick look around.

The first thing I was greeted with on entering the new service was the message: “Ah – it looks like you already know Rich D—-; why don’t you connect to him on here?”

And that, dear reader, brought the whole sorry mess tumbling out of that back drawer in my head.

This service was entirely greenfield territory to me. I had shared absolutely nothing with it, other than my name and email address (by virtue of using it as the basis of my registration).

So the only way this matching could have occurred would be if Rich had clicked on the “Pillage Me!” button, and passed his entire address book to the new service, there to be held in limbo until such time as happy little matches like me popped up to trigger this unwelcome welcome.

I know I’ve agonised on this blog before about what makes personal data personal. About how uniqueness, utility and linkability all have a big bearing on just how “personal” a piece of data is (and how much we should therefore be bothered by its loss or misappropriation).

Just having one bit of data floating about would be concerning enough, but–and this is a big but: what if that address book pillaging also took not just the raw email address itself, but also the associated name (or indeed any other fields)?

Anon@freetibetbyforce.com may just be an address to a dead-drop online account, but if it’s ever been associated with a real name, manually entered, in someone’s address book…(you see where I’m going here?)…the consequences could be pretty horrendous. Obviously this is an extreme example–but it makes the point–third parties are sharing your email address and perhaps related personal data in vast quantities, without really realising they are doing so, with services that hold it…where? how securely? for how long? IN ORDER TO MATCH YOU UP ON SOME LAME SKILLS NETWORK SITE?

When companies first started this sort of indiscriminate hoarding and sharing of personal data, we created the Data Protection Act as a countermeasure. Clearly, it’s getting hopelessly out of date and was never designed for this sort of scenario.

But humour me, and assume we should still adhere to its principles.

That would mean that you, me, anyone with an address book, could (or should?) be required to register as a Data Controller–mindful of the fact that our own address books have powerful, valuable content and with one click we become complicit in a process that spreads it way beyond the bounds of any purpose we could sensibly be said to have consented to.

I think this is hugely important, as no matter how careful we are with our own information, we are entirely reliant on the caution of others not to compromise it.

It’s an interesting one. Exam question for the Information Commissioner’s Office then: how big does your address book have to be before you need to register it under the Data Protection Act?