Personal Information Healthchecks Help Everyone

The Information Commissioner's Office has released an online tool called the Personal Information Healthcheck to help consumers protect their personal information. It is also a useful quick training tool for web site developers and designers.

The Personal Information Healthcheck was announced in a press release this week by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). Each question provides advice on protecting personal information with a summary and suggestions depending on the user's overall score.

I was pleased to discover the tool's diagnosis of my own behaviour was:

This type of initiative helps everyone, not just consumers. It also increases awareness of the ICO's lengthy but good Personal Information Toolkit released in January 2007. Web developers and designers should also use the healthcheck tool - it can help improve understanding of data security and Data Protection Act issues in their own projects. Question 11 for example asks if you use the same password or PIN for multiple accounts.

The online bank Smile fell into this trap when they joined the Verified by Visa (VbV) password protected identity checking service. Instead of asking their customers to provide a password for VbV, they transferred one of the online banking authentication credentials to Visa for this purpose. See the report in PCPro magazine. I don't understand how Visa accepted this method either.

Banks should be using best practice - I wonder why they decided to do it this way?