New Life for Old Data
Most businesses have third-party personal data stored and gathering dust. This may be for compliance reasons. Or maybe you have third-party data that you are using but you want to use it in a new way to benefit your company. So how do you go about it without falling foul of data protection legislation?
Here are a few things to bear in mind.
Define Your Purpose
There are ways you can innovatively use data in your possession in a way that benefits your business, but will not result in data protection complaints. For example, if you collected client contact information to keep them up to date by email and post with details of your new products, you can’t use that information to cold call to their door – they didn’t give their permission for that. You could, however, use anonomysed address information to work out a geographic distribution of your client base to help you plan your next store location.
Do you Have Consent?
The data protection acts set out that individuals must know the purposes that you are collecting their data for, and that the data you have must only be used for these purposes. You aren’t permitted to collect data where the parameters for use are too broadly defined, so you can’t dream up a one-fits-all consent form. This makes sense as there are few people willing to hand over personal data without knowing explicitly what it will be used for. Make sure that you review the permission you received from data subjects when they gave their information over, and that this covers whatever 'data mining' you intend to do.
Get it Organised
Of course, to meaningfully use any data that your organisation collects, it must be organised appropriately. This is not a given, especially with older data sets. While there are ways around this - for example, scanning documents with text recognition software, you may need to enlist outside help to do this.
In conclusion, you may have reams of great information in your archives but you are restricted to using it only for that which the data subject has given consent. By communicating clearly with data subjects, and keeping your data well organised, you can position your organisation to use older data effectively.
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