Data Protection

The data protection act and the computer misuse act are laws, declared in 1990 and 1998, to protect personal data you have stored on computers or the internet. With more and more people and businesses using computers to store private data, the government needed to find a way of regulating:

• Who had access to this information?
• How accurate it was
• Was it easy to find and copy?
• Was it stored with the persons permission?
• Did anyone keep record of changes made to the databases?

What spawned was the data protection act and computer misuse act, it meant people could be charged and punished for:

• Unauthorised access to private data
• Unauthorised modification to private data
• Unauthorised access with the intent of committing a crime

People like MI5 were exempt from this and if it was data stored for personal use (e.g friend's addresses in a contact book etc) was also allowed.

There are many reasons these acts are important, especially the data protection act. Without them, children and technologically unwise people could legally have their contact data online for anyone to access. Children' medical and contact records could be accessible to potential criminals and some naive kids might put their parents bank details online making fraud more common.