A MAN who ended his subscription to a dating agency is among the complainants to the Data Protection Commissioner listed in the case studies section of the 1995 annual report.
The man was concerned that once his membership was discontinued the agency should not continue to hold sensitive and intimate information about him.
The commissioner investigated his complaint and, having established that information about members was held on computer told the company the Data Protection Act precluded it from keeping such details longer than necessary.
Another complainant was a patient who had not received a copy of personal data requested from her doctor.
The commissioner found the doctor had no computerised data on the patient. Paper records were kept, but these did not come under the provisions of the Act. However, the doctor was informed of his obligation to let the patient know, within 40 days of a request, that he had no data within the meaning of the Act on her case.
A cinema which retained credit card details of a person using a card to book tickets was also investigated. The cinema's computer system was inspected and the employer was told that once payment from the credit card company had been received, there was no basis for retaining any information.
The cinema was also told it was not entitled to use the information to contact the customer, unless, consent had been requested.
Credit referencing was the subject of a number of complaints investigated. In one case, a man complained a credit referencing company was keeping a record of a court judgment registered against him 14 years earlier, but on instigation it was found the record had in fact been deleted.
A second company was found not only to still have the record but to have no procedure for deleting such details after a fixed period. The company agreed to review its practices.
Another complaint, from a man whose name and a similar address were shared by a person who had applied for a loan, was not upheld.
The complainant was concerned that he might be mistaken for someone with a high level of financial commitment, but the commissioner accepted the credit referencing company's assurances of steps taken to prevent confusion between, the two parties.