This article is from page 18 of the 2006-05-09 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 18 JPG
CLARE County Council is to place details in relation to all new planning applications on its website later this year.
However, the Council’s Director for Planning, Bernadette Kinsella said that in response to concerns expressed by the Data Protection Commissioner on the level of detail to be made available online, the Council is in consultation with the Department of the Environment on the issue.
She said: “we are awaiting guidance from the department with regard to the treatment of applicants’ personal data.”
In the annual report of the Data Protection Commissioner published last week, the Commissioner stated that it has “an issue with the placing of the submissions in relation to planning files in their entirety on a web-site”.
The Data Protection Commissioner cites a case study in his report on the issue where he states “even where there is legislation providing that information must be made available to the public, this may not always mean that it is appropriate to place such information on a website”.
The Commissioner Office states: “where details of submissions are being placed on a website – thus being made available to a potentially huge audience – our advice is that the minimum of personal information should be disclosed.
“In our opinion, it should be sufficient in such cases to give the name and address of the person concerned. It should not be necessary for the general public (as opposed to Council officials) to have the phone numbers of the people concerned – the scope for abuse (e.g. in the form of harassing phone calls) is obvious in such cases.
“Where submissions are being scanned in order to be placed on a website, our advice is that any phone/ email contact details contained in them should first be ‘blacked out’.
“While this involves extra work for already hard-pressed Council officials, we believe that the effort involved is worthwhile in order to protect the privacy of the people concerned.
Ms Kinsella stated: “the Council commencerd scanning documentation relating to Planning applications in May, 2005.
“Since 1st January 2006 all new applications being lodged are scanned and available for viewing on the four computers located in the Public Office of the Planning Department.
“These computers provide members of the public with the ability to search Planning Files and view documents which have been scanned.
“We intend having these scanned images available on the Council website. It is planned that this would happen in the latter part of 2006, subject to the resolution of some technical issues.”