Privacy Laws In Action

What information can a landlord pass on about their tenants?

This is more difficult because there are no specific statutory rules about the landlord-tenant relationship apart from the law on deposits that now have to be held by an independent third party, the damage deposit, and the general law of real property regarding landlord and tenant. Essentially the landlord will maintain a record of the inventory, the payment of rent, the payment of deposit, the inventory at the end of the tenancy, any damage that is paid for, and the damage deposit. That is information that that landlord can legitimately hold and could legitimately pass on to someone else with the knowledge of the tenant. Now, the tenancy agreements that I have seen do not have any particular provision stating that the landlord is going to process information about the tenant and is going to pass it on to other landlords. The landlord, strictly speaking, if that information is going to be collected and processed, and particularly if there's an intention to pass it on to another landlord, should give a Data Protection Act Notice in the tenancy agreement. Although, as I've said, the ones I've seen don't have such a declaration.

What information is a landlord not allowed to pass on about their tenants?

This is partly a matter of data protection law. That is, the processing of personal data about the tenant should be subject to a test of legitimacy of purpose, of notice to the tenants and so on. It also involves the law of defamation. That is, liability and slander. In the law of defamation, information that is communicated, which is damaging to the reputation of a person, may be the subject of compensation if the information is damaging, and if the landlord, the person, who communicates it cannot prove that it's true. I said 'landlord' there because landlord communications, in many circumstances, will be covered by a kind of privilege. That is to say, if the landlord has a duty to tell another landlord about the records of a tenant, and if the other landlord has a legal interest in obtaining that information, say the tenant has applied for another tenancy, and if the information is damaging and false, the landlord who passed on the information will only be liable if the information is damaging, if it's false, and if the landlord was acting maliciously. This is the kind of privilege known as 'qualified privilege'. The reason for that is that it is assumed that in many circumstances, employment references, tenancy references, for example, there is a public interest in the communication of information between employers, between landlords, between banks, between educational institutions, such that it should be protected from damages, unless it's damaging, false, and malicious. Malice can include a reckless disregard for truth or falsity.

What information can I access about my examinations?

In the United Kingdom, you do not have a right to see your examination script its self once an examination script has been submitted. You do have a right to see comments made on it and the educational establishment has an obligation to have a system so you can see those comments. This is not the case in all countries. Under the French Act in 1978, one of the very first cases involved a successful application by a student who wanted to see the backalorid script he had written. So the law in this case is not the same in all countries.

Can I take legal action if I have been photographed without permission?

There are four civil wrongs, torts, delicts in the Roman system, generally to classify kinds of invasion of privacy. The fourth one, that is appropriation of likeness is a tort in almost all of the states of the United States. So if someone takes your photograph and uses it without your permission, at least for commercial purposes, then you can sue and get compensation. There is no such law in this country, so if your photograph is taken and is used for commercial purposes, then you do not have any right to compensation. This is slightly modified by the rules of the advertising standards authority, which is a non-statutory, private, self-regulatory body, which says that photographs of living individuals should not be used for advertising purposes without their consent. However, that's only a rule of an industry self-regulatory body and not a rule of law, so you do not have a right to control your likeness, that's your appearance or your voice, in this country.

Do you think these laws are effective in protecting privacy?

They are better than nothing. There is a constant struggle between the enhancement of information technology for the purpose of surveillance for various purposes, for commercial purposes, for political purposes, for law enforcement purposes, for revenue purposes. And the efforts by the law makers and the law enforcers, the data protection authorities...the lawmakers always seem to be one step behind the technology but this is the case in law and almost all technology. One partial solution is to make laws that are not technology specific. In other words, if you want to make a law about monitoring, it is probably not such a good idea to make a law about television monitoring because the next technology may be something that isn't television, an entirely new form of technology. It is better, I think, to make laws in terms of principles that can adapt to changes in technology and then there is the question of whether attitudes toward privacy are changing along with the technology. It is often said that younger people have less concern about privacy than their parents. The example being the kind of information that young people will willingly, the kind of personal information, personal data, people will willingly place on the Internet through social networking sites and it is said that young people do this knowing that many people will be able to access personal data which a previous generation might have regarded as being intensely private. I'm not so sure about that partly because I suspect in many circumstances people who use these social networking sites do not completely understand the extent to which that information may be stored, shared, communicated, and manipulated. To give just one example, recently, in Oxford, students who were celebrating the end of examinations boisterously are now getting emails from the university proprietors informing them that they have violated the rules of the university and they are being fined because they posted videos of themselves on a social networking site and the students are saying that they didn't intend for the university officials to see those. So, perhaps, attitudes are not changing as much as many say. So to get back to whether the laws are effective or not, I will simply say, they are better than nothing. To take a comparative example, if you go to the United States, there is no General Data Protection Act there, applying to the public and private sectors. There are many specific acts, like The Privacy Act, which relates to information held by the federal government. There are laws on financial privacy. There is even a specific law on the use of information about video recording rentals which is now almost completely out of date in terms of technology, however, there is no general data protection law and I suspect that the use of personal data for the purposes of marketing is probably far more widespread in the U.S. than it is here.

Does the Data Protection Act protect minors?

Yes, it does apply to minors. In fact, the consent of the minor probably wouldn't be sufficient for the purposes of the Advertising Standards Authority. There is also a rule in the Code of Conduct for the Press Complaints Commission, which also is a non-statutory, industry self-regulating body which says that photographs of minors should not generally be used without the consent of their parent or legal guardian unless there is a particular public interest. And again, the public interest is supposed to be something more important than simply what the public are interested in.