Three out of four UK businesses are unprepared for the introduction of the Data Protection Act 1998 next month, claims a report published yesterday. The managing director of GB Information Management, a UK information management software company which commissioned the research, said companies were remarkably nonchalant about the need for data protection [under the new law]. Half of the company directors quizzed did not know they would be held personally liable for the accuracy of their database, the survey found.
The new law, which is intended to bring the UK into line with European Union policy, gives individuals far greater powers to gain access to information held on them and require it to be changed if inaccurate, and to take legal action if the information is used for any purposes without their consent. The government has given warnings that companies must plan their IT systems to make it easier for them to comply with the new requirement, stressing that expense or technological difficulty would not be acceptable excuses.
The survey was conducted by Continental Research in April 1999 and sampled 200 medium and large companies from the over 100,000 with annual revenues over 1 million pounds ($1.6m).
