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Privacy compromised by local council inaction
November 15, 2006 2:17 PM
Councillor Jim Tolson, Opposition Spokesman for Adult Services and MSP candidate for Dunfermline West, has been questioning Environmental Services over their poor security record with recycling the public's computers.
Through correspondence with the head of Environmental Services at Fife Council, Jim Tolson has discovered that no precautions have been taken to ensure that individual's data is not passed onto undesirable sources.
It has transpired that PCs that the public have been taking to their Recycling Centres are not in fact being recycled, and as they will not have any extra money until the EU Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directive comes into effect next April, Environmental Services is currently still not recycling used PCs. In actual fact they are just being dumped into landfill with whatever contaminants they may contain.
Furthermore, Environmental Services are not willing to store used PCs until the WEEE Directive comes into effect, and have given no firm assurances that they would even destroy the Hard Disks by 'driving a spike through them', to use the Environmental Services term.
Councillor Jim Tolson said:
"It is absolutely disgraceful that members of the public take their old PCs to the recycling centre in good faith only to find that they are thrown into landfill, and this will continue to be the case for several months yet. At present large numbers of computers are not actually being recycled, unbeknown to the public who think their equipment is being safely disposed of. Environmental Services have informed me that they won't have the funds to do so until April.
"With identity fraud posing a major problem at the moment, the Council is still unable to guarantee that the public's old hard disks will be destroyed. This is putting people's privacy at risk to thieves who could retrieve sensitive information from our old computers even if the hard drive has been reformatted. This situation is unacceptable and I urge the Council to rectify the problem as soon as possible, and I urge the council to store any old computers until the WEE directive comes into effect and ensure that the hard discs cannot fall into the hands of criminals!"
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