In the March edition of the Family Tree Magazine (UK) there is an interesting
and important article in the "This may interest you" column called Share with
Care. Which may be of interest to list members who have family tree
web sites.
The article is too long to copy in full, but the main points in it are as
follows:
Family Tree web sites which include data about living people appear to breach
two principals of the Data Protection Act 1998
"Data relating to living people from which they can be identified would be
classed as personal data. So publishing ... date of birth, place of birth,
date of marriage and relationship to other family members ... (without
informing) the individuals concerned that he was going to publish their
personal data and did not give them the chance to object would breach the
first data protection principal
Secondly a person publishing this personal data would need to register with
the Data Protection Officer, and "to process personal data without
notification ... is an offence."
There are, however, some exemptions and a visit to the website of the Data
Protection Office may be useful
WWW.dataprotection.gov.uk.
Regards
Alwyn
List Administrator
(just about to knock all the cousins off my web site:-( )