The Office of the Information Commissioner, the UK’s data sharing and protection watchdog, has published a new set of guidelines to help businesses decide how to handle their customers’ data. The guidelines are now available for public consultation. 

The guidelines invite organisations to develop their own ‘code of practice’, based on their requirements and obligations, and in so doing develop a best practice approach to private data handling, as opposed to data sharing policies dictated by legislation.

“Using the framework code will help organisations to ensure that they address all the main data protection compliance issues that are likely to arise when personal information is being shared,” the ICO said in a statement. “This in turn should help front-line practitioners to make well-informed decisions about sharing personal information.” 

The guidelines invite organisations to ask why they need to share private data, find out what legislation applies to their data sharing practices, envisage situations in which customers’ data could be compromised and consider alternatives to sharing private data.

To read the consultation draft of the guidelines click here (pdf).

Further reading

Information Age feature - Inside job - internal security threats
Information Age feature - The upside of compliance