{"id":1033,"date":"2013-05-13T11:52:15","date_gmt":"2013-05-13T11:52:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/education\/?p=1033"},"modified":"2021-10-18T08:25:29","modified_gmt":"2021-10-18T08:25:29","slug":"when-is-a-leak-not-a-leak-an-investigation-into-childrens-home-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/education\/2013\/05\/when-is-a-leak-not-a-leak-an-investigation-into-childrens-home-data\/","title":{"rendered":"When is a leak not a leak: An investigation into children’s home data"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tweet<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

\"Childrens<\/p>\n

While\u00a0<\/span>working on a story relating to children\u2019s care homes,\u00a0Beth Ashton<\/strong> stumbled across some\u00a0data that shouldn’t have been public. What she did next illustrates the ethical and legal issues facing journalists and public bodies dealing with sensitive subjects.<\/em><\/p>\n

A few months ago, in the process of looking at children’s care home inspection reports<\/strong> for a story,\u00a0I stumbled across a Freedom of Information\u00a0request which I believed contained sensitive information.<\/p>\n

Children’s homes are inspected by Ofsted<\/strong> – but each home is identified only by a\u00a0Unique Reference Number (URN)<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

It is the only way to confirm that the report corresponds a specific home, and a URN is\u00a0the only way to find a specific Children\u2019s Home inspection on the Ofsted website.<\/p>\n

While browsing FOI requests to the body on WhatDoTheyKnow, however,\u00a0I found a document which contained both<\/em> the reference numbers and the names<\/em> of care homes which corresponded to them.<\/p>\n

This posed a number of dilemmas.<\/p>\n

Ofsted say\u00a0on their website<\/a>\u00a0that the names and addresses of childrens homes are not published\u00a0\u201cin order to safeguard the welfare of children and protect their privacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was also the response I got when I first called Ofsted press office asking for the reference numbers for children\u2019s care homes.<\/p>\n

Knowing the names of the care homes in the Ofsted reports by their URNs meant I would be able to find geographical trends such as (in theory) the geographical locations with the best and worst Ofsted ratings.<\/p>\n

It also meant that parents, relatives, guardians of looked after children would be able to see how their children\u2019s home was performing – something that they cannot currently do without the URN. But equally, those which the authorities are trying to keep away from vulnerable children would have more information about the children’s homes they attended.<\/p>\n

Finally, although I\u2019m not going to link to it here, this data was available on websites where companies buy data.<\/p>\n

What I did next<\/h2>\n

For me, the need to prevent such a leak happening again superseded my data project. I wanted to find out how this happened and whether it would happen again.<\/p>\n

The strangest thing about the response on WDTK was that it wasn\u2019t even relevant to the original request, which asked for something entirely different (see screen grabs below).<\/p>\n

\"Children's<\/p>\n

I contacted WhatDoTheyKnow who immediately took down the information, saying:<\/p>\n

\u201cAll requests and responses sent via WhatDoTheyKnow are automatically published online without any human intervention \u2013 this is the key feature that makes this site both valuable and popular. If we are made aware of an issue of sensitivity – or if we come across it ourselves – we will immediately take down the report in question while we make decisions about how to proceed.<\/p>\n

“In the case of the issue you alerted us to – identification numbers for homes for looked-after children – this is exactly what happened.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It then came down to whether or not Ofsted should have released the information.<\/p>\n

I approached Ofsted a second time, this time with the screenshots and the full story of how this information came to be online.<\/p>\n

It turned out that, at the time of the information’s release to and publication on\u00a0WhatDoTheyKnow.com<\/a>, it was not<\/em> against Ofsted\u2019s regulations to publish care home identification numbers – although it now is.<\/p>\n

In the end, this was a story about Ofted\u2019s own rules not working retrospectively, or taking into account the permanence of the internet.\u00a0Ofsted themselves did not seem concerned about the information being available online.<\/p>\n

The investigation, then, didn\u2019t turn out to be the major data leak I thought it might be. It did, however, make me wonder about other published material that has been retrospectively revoked in the general sense but not online.<\/p>\n

I am convinced that if this can happen in one instance data that has been redacted later in its life will still be hidden in the corners of the Internet.<\/p>\n

Race you to it.<\/p>\n

This was originally published on Beth Ashton’s personal blog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tweet While\u00a0working on a story relating to children\u2019s care homes,\u00a0Beth Ashton stumbled across some\u00a0data that shouldn’t have been public. What she did next illustrates the ethical and legal issues facing journalists and public bodies dealing with sensitive subjects. A few … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[297,11],"tags":[546,547,548,74,549,550,551],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1033"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1033"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1033\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1261,"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1033\/revisions\/1261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}