Keeping Personal Data Personal

Posted on 22/09/2014

In this edition of the Views from the Top column in The Business Times, the topic was about the impact of the Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA). Achieve CEO Joshua Yim comments on the impact of the PDPA on his organisation so far:

“The impact of the PDPA on B2B companies such as ours is not as large as compared with B2C companies. As a recruitment agency and human resource consulting firm, there are two main groups of external stakeholders in our business: clients (other companies) who are our customers, and job candidates. The candidates certainly want us to call them as we are helping them to find jobs so the restrictions under the Do Not Call Registry do not really affect our company given the nature of our business. Administratively, however, we now include a disclaimer in our job advertisements and application forms requiring candidates to acknowledge their consent for us to forward their resumes to our clients during the job placement process. Internally, our own recruitment consultants are all required to sign an agreement stating that they will treat all personal data they come across in the course of their work with utmost confidentiality. The new PDPA mandate has also impacted the way we store data within our company. We are looking into ways to eliminate the extra time and effort that will be needed to keep all these personal data in physical form under lock and key. One way is to go paperless so we are exploring how we can digitise more of our day-to-day work activities using technology to ensure the security of the data.”

Source : The Business Times, 22 September 2014