Our Christmas Tale….Data Protection

A month before Christmas Eve….

Santa was sitting in his chair contemplating what the festive season would hold when he got a knock at his door.

It was one of the elder elves who had run so fast he was clean out of breath.

“Santa, you have to come quickly! Jonny, one of our most experienced elves, has handed in his notice, claiming bullying and harassment.”

Santa knew Jonny, and this was not a false alarm.

Something had gone terribly wrong.

Jonny’s Data Protection Grievance?

When Santa arrived at Jonny’s hut, Jonny was all red-faced and looking pretty furious.

Santa sat down with Jonny and asked him to explain what had upset him so much.

Jonny said that he thought a number of the other elves had been making fun of him on their What’s App channel and that some of their comments led him to believe this was rife within North Pole Inc.

Santa explained that he knew nothing about this, and if he thought that anything was going on, he would have put a stop to it.

Jonny also said he thought his personal data had been leaked to third parties, as he was being spammed through his email account.

He was very annoyed about this. He wanted to know what the company had been storing by way of his personal information and who the company had sent it to.

Santa agreed that his complaint should be heard as an official grievance and said he would set up the hearing.

Jonny then handed Santa a letter.

Santa opened it and read it out loud.

It was a Data Subject Access Request (DSAR) asking for all of Jonny’s personal data to be supplied to him within the next thirty days.

Santa had never seen one of these before and sat in disbelief.

“Jonny!” he exclaimed, “I don’t know if I can collate this information for you in this timescale.”

Jonny got up from his chair, turned to Santa and said in a low voice:

“Well Santa, if I don’t receive it, I will be making a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office.”

Jonny walked out of the room.

“Oh No!” Santa shouted. “Why does this always happen at our busiest time?”

Unhelpful IT Systems!

Santa sat down in front of his PC and started making a list of all the places Jonny’s personal data could be.

There was:

• The shared drive of course and the HR system
• The CRM system and the operational packing system.
• The filing cabinet definitely had some of Jonny’s information in it. T
• There was the email system
• WhatsApp
• Messenger
• The Company’s mobile phones, PCs, Tablets, Slack….

All of a sudden, Santa jumped up and just screamed: “Why do we have all of this personal data on so many systems?”

Santa started to run some reports from the systems.

There were gigabytes of information coming out of the systems relating to Jonny.

“This is going to take a very, very long time,” Santa muttered under his breath.

Suddenly, there was a knock at the door, and the IT Elf came bursting in.

“I have something to show you”, he said.

The Elf sat down with Santa and explained that he had built a closed AI platform on a standalone server.

If Santa dropped all of the data from all of the systems onto the server, then his AI Agent would be able to pick out all of Jonny’s personal data.

Santa was amazed.

He transferred all the data he had extracted, and, lo and behold, the AI Agent produced a beautifully crafted report for Jonny detailing all his personal data. It had even redacted anyone else’s personal data, too!

“Amazing!” Santa gasped.

The report was sent to Jonny to review well within the 30-day deadline.

When Jonny received the data, he found that actually there were no messages teasing him and that all the data the company held was strictly necessary for his employment.

In fact, the spam email was generated because his personal email address had been published on the Dark Web and was publicly available.

Jonny felt relieved about this and wrote to Santa to thank him for providing the information so quickly. Christmas Eve preparation could now be prioritised again.

IT Systems, IT Systems and More IT Systems!

Santa, on the other hand, was less than impressed when he looked back at how this mess could have derailed the company’s goals and objectives for the year.

All of the systems operated by the company were putting personal data at risk, and he needed to do something about it.

He asked IT Elf to produce a report in the New Year that details how the company could gain better control of the data it holds.

The IT Elf reached around from his back and handed a document to Santa.

“I already did it for you last night Santa.”

Santa looked at IT Elf and smiled. He couldn’t help but think to himself what a wonderful team he had at North Pole Inc.

As Christmas has been saved for another year, all that leaves us to do is to wish all of our Clients, Associates and HR Smart Friends a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!