[OSM-talk] [Osmf-talk] Membership applications from Skobbler employees

[David Earl]

On 26/08/2011 11:33, Barnett, Phillip wrote:
>  From the legislation guidance notes
> "An individual is 'identified' if you have distinguished that individual
> from other members of a group. In most cases an individual's name
> together with some other information will be sufficient to identify them."
> http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/determining_what_is_personal_data/whatispersonaldata2.htm
>
> So if you had said that a large number of applications had been made
> from Apple employees, then since we have no way of knowing whether every
> single Apple employee, up to and including the janitor, had made an
> application to join, we are not be able to reverse-engineer the
> membership status of any individual employee, and so this is not
> 'personal' information but aggregate group information.
>
> And therefore the Data Protection Act doesn't come into it.

Interestingly, when we converted an organisation recently to an official 
Charity under UK law, the Charity Commission wanted us to make it a 
requirement that the full membership list (names and home addresses) was 
available on demand to any member who requests it. That is the default 
position of their model constitution for charities. This seemed to us 
very odd indeed, quite contrary to Data Protection principles. The CC 
didn't actually insist on that as a requirement of our constitution, but 
we queried the point with them and they basically said "the organisation 
is the membership and if you can't show to someone that the membership 
exists, then the organisation doesn't exist" (I paraphrase).

See Part 2, sec 8.4 
http://www.charity-commission.gov.uk/library/guidance/gd3text.pdf

David