Personal Data is personal information about you and everyone else. It includes home address, home phone number, home email address but also media such as photographs, videos and sound recordings and any other information that uniquely identifies a living person.
It’s important to look after this information for two reasons:
- Unscrupulous people can use to for marketing or to commit crime, such as sending annoying text messages or applying for a loan in your (or someone else’s) name.
- The law, known as the Data Protection Act, requires individuals and organisations to handle Personal Data in specific ways. If this isn’t done we could be committing a criminal offense or exposing the University to very large monetary penalties.
Personal data needs to be handled properly on computers or anywhere else. The information needs to be treated with appropriate care which means using appropriate organisational and technical measures to prevent unauthorised or unlawful processing and to prevent accidental loss or damage to the information.
You can get advice about how to handle Personal Data on your computer here.
General information about Data Protection can be found at the University Portal site here: https://portal.lincoln.ac.uk/C6/C16/DP/default.aspx
There is also more information for students at: https://portal.lincoln.ac.uk/C12/C3/DPStudents/default.aspx
And more information for staff at: https://portal.lincoln.ac.uk/C10/C10/DP/default.aspx