An interesting case about data protection is reported by the Marketing Law website, where delegate lists were ultimately deemed not to be “personal information” and therefore not protected by the Data Protection Act. As always, the lawyers at Osbourne Clarke provide detailed analysis of the ruling, concluding that if a delegate’s name can be correlated with the organisation that they are representing, then the data is protected.
So if you are organising conferences, make sure you get permission if you plan to circulate delegate lists with company information to other attendees. And if, like us, you work in PR, I’m afraid that this ruling doesn’t allow show organisers to provide the complete press list – you’ll still need to work the phones to find out which editors will attend each show.