Tag Archives: personal demographics service

Personal Demographics Service: Department of Health

By Mark Pack | Sun 16th October 2011 - 9:50 am

I’ve blogged before about some of the security issues around the NHS’s Personal Demographics Service – a mammoth database with 80,000,000 personal records in it, yet with 700,000 people granted access to it – and with such limited auditing systems that experts have concluded it is “incredibly difficult if not impossible” to detect or trace misuse of the data.

So it was good to see Julian Huppert take up with issue with a Parliamentary question, asking the Department of Health what assessments it has made of how adequate the safeguards in the PDS really are at preventing illegal access to …

Did journalists really not misuse one of the UK’s largest databases of personal contact details?

By Mark Pack | Wed 31st August 2011 - 8:54 am

Here’s a little conundrum for you.

Imagine you are a journalist working on one of the many titles that the Information Commissioner found was involved in dubious practices to get hold of personal information about people.

Don’t you think it’s quite likely you would now and again have wanted to get hold of someone’s home address? Perhaps to track down someone to doorstep them. Or maybe to trawl round the relatives of someone famous to find if anyone is willing to give you an interview.

Now imagine there is a database of people in Britain which is so comprehensive and has been built …

Posted in News | Also tagged featured, journalism, neil bhatia and NHS | 11 Comments