On Fri, 7 Dec 2001, Frank March wrote:
Under the Privacy Act, anyone is entitled to ask for information held about them on a database (a Web site qualifies as such under the Act IIRC) to be corrected or amended, or deleted should the information no longer have any purpose in being stored. The person concerned is exercising a legal right and Waikato University is obliged to recognise that. I am surprised that the request to Donald has not been couched rather more forcefully. If action is not taken it may well be; it is not impossible that Waikato University could request that this list be removed from the site altogether. They would be entitled to do so.
Just a small follow-up here. The archives are currently setup in such a way that only the server administrators (not individual list admins) can edit the web pages. So, we would just go ahead and do it if we felt it was the right thing to do, and there's (hopefully) going to be no threats to remove the archives or list as a whole. Personally speaking, while I see Mr Bamberger's request as quite reasonable, doing any kind of editing without at least consulting with the list owner and original poster would be a bad thing for the integrity of our list archives, and could also set a precedent that would result in many more frivilous requests being recieved. However, since the Privacy Act has been invoked, this may not turn out to be official policy, which I hope to be able to post soon. Until then, status quo will be maintained on list.waikato.ac.nz and nothing will be edited except at the request of list owners. -- ** Colin Palmer, Systems and Development Group, University of Waikato, NZ ** - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog