MonitorPrivacy Commissioner publicly ventures into surreal territory
Warnings about disclosure of information already legitimately out in the open takes this branch of officialdom beyond realm of common sense
Oh dear. Hong Kong has got itself all snarled up in another ludicrous muddle.
On Friday governance and transparency advocate David Webb took down from the internet a list of the names of more than 1,000 Hong Kong residents, many of them prominent businesspeople, complete with their identity card numbers legitimately gleaned from freely available web sources.
Webb removed the list after receiving an e-mail message from the city's Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data (PCPD) warning him that by re-publishing publicly disclosed information he may have been in breach of Hong Kong's data privacy law.
In investigating Webb, the Privacy Commissioner is venturing deep into surreal territory. The very reason Webb put his list on up on the internet in the first place was to demonstrate that there is nothing secret or privileged about ID card numbers. Therefore the Privacy Commissioner's argument that requiring company directors to disclose their identity card numbers in the Companies Registry is a gross intrusion into their personal privacy is a load of nonsense.
But the commissioner's office is clearly not a body willing to be deterred either by common sense or clear evidence.
The same day it issued a statement declaring that "personal data shall only be collected for a purpose directly related to a function and activity of the data user".