No, I have not gone through the Data Protection Act etc. I asked FindMyPast whether the records of living people in the 1939 Register were covered by their Data Protection Act registration, or exempt (as I assumed there was no point contacting the ICO about it if they were exempt), and if exempt, why, and their reply was just that living people's records are closed if they are under 100 years old, which didn't help. So I contacted the ICO and they said to open a case. It's up to them now.
If the 1939 Register records of living people are not covered by the Data Protection Act then I wonder why the "Takedown form" for the 1939 Register on Findmypast says "You can use this form to request a takedown of a record if the information you have found is open and you believe it should be closed under the Data Protection Act 1998." But I don't really think there would be any point asking Findmypast.
The 100 year rule is not something with legal standing and is really nothing more than office policy,
There was a 100 year rule legislated for under a Lord Chancellor's Statutory Instrument number 12 in 1966 but that was repealed by the Freedom of Information Act.
Only six out of the 15 pre-1910 United Kingdom censuses have been closed for 100 years; nine out of 15 have been released after less than 90 years. The average closure period for censuses in Britain is 80 years.
Rather than worry about the occasional error we the general public should be more worried about parliament being deliberately lied to as was done on at least three occasions when deliberating on whether the NHS used the 1939 register as the basis of the NHS register.
The fact that civil servants can blatantly lie to parliament with no repercussions is to my mind far more important.
In a similar way the Registrar General exceeded his authority with the 1981 census (the first one to carry a promise of closure of the census for 100 years) he later had to admit to parliament that he had no right to make that promise and had to apologise to parliament. He should have had to apolgise to the public and then been sacked on the spot.
To my mind, the question is not whether living people's records should be opened or not, but whether FindMyPast's process for opening records actually stuck to the rules which they had agreed with TNA, and if it did, there must be something seriously wrong with the post-2007 GRO death index as it must include records exactly matching people who are still alive who are considered "unique" according to the matching rules (e.g. there must have been a death registration for a Michael R Heseltine with the exact same date of birth as Lord Heseltine., a death registration for a Dennis E Skinner with the exact same date of birth as the MP, and so on.) I am hoping that we will eventually know what the explanation is!
The simple answer to that is FindMyPast have worked with the NHS and the TNA to release the data on the 1939. They are in close contact with each other and developed the procedures together; it is not a case of the TNA and the NHS standing back.
One explanation of records of living people being open is one created by the system used to transcribe the 1939.
Instead of transcribing line by line FindMyPast was required to redact all columns except the column to be transcribed, i.e. the transcribers only viewed one column of text, such a method allowed errors such as lines being missed in a column or a line transcribed twice. Some of these were found in the pre-release checks some slipped through.
It would have been far better to have allowed the transcribers access to the full page from the register rather than being paranoid about a transcriber remembering information from hundreds of lines transcribed in a day.
Cheers
Guy
