Old school data protection
January 8th, 2006 at 16:15
I’ve finally got back my data after sending a data protection request to my old school. In case you havn’t been keeping up: you can write to any company or organisation and demand all of the information they hold about you. They can charge you upto a tenner to do it, but it’s certainly worth the money.
The school’s certainly reacted slightly differently to my former employers, whom I did the same thing with. After not responding for about two weeks, I went up to the school to investigate, and it turns out they were trying to out-trick James O’Malley! They demanded the tenner in the same sickeningly “haha, I’m so clever” way that I demanded my data.
It can’t be a coincidence that a big two page spread of information on the data protection act appeared in this week’s school newsletter, can it?
Yesterday morning I was delighted to find a huge package had been sent to me through the post- it contained around one hundred A4 pages about me- approximately one metric tree. Most of it was photocopies of old school reports, although like with my former employers, there was some other gems:
The letter that my former employers sent to the school asking for my reference, and the form my head of house filled in on the return:
As you can see- aside from my head of house not putting much effort into filling out this form for my former employer, I’ve got hold of some strictly private and confidential information! It’s a shame I wasn’t a little bastard (industry term) whilst at school, then this would have been much more exciting “James throws chairs at teachers”, “James is so tough and threatening that we just debit the cumulative lunchmoney of all the students in the school to his bank account monthly”.Better than this though, I got back the secret teacher bit of the UCAS form that they refused to show us last year when we were applying to University. All of the teachers wrote reports on the students which were then forwarded to UCAS… and I have what they have to say about me! It’s so very damning:
Key quote: “He is an intellectual who loves to learn”. Yeah, that’s me. Have you seen my post about Big Brother? Or all the ones where I go out drinking, and steal the inevitable traffic cone?
As thrilling an experience this has been, I don’t think we’ve learnt that much- the school are essentially saying “I’m ace”, and of course, we already knew that. But even so… the data protection act is powerful. If we worked together we could bring the school beaurocracy to grind to a halt, and cause them to miss the 40 limit, landing them with a massive fine or something… hooray!
Categories: Stunts, Uncategorized, Wilkinsons |