Many etailers think that this act doesn't apply to them, but they are wrong. If you store the personal details of your customers on your server or PC then you at least need to be aware of the basics of this act. In essence "The Act covers any data which can be used to identify a living person. This including names, birthday and anniversary dates, addresses, telephone numbers, Fax numbers, e-mail addresses etc."

Just by hosting your ecommerce site on a foreign server outside of the EEA may leave you in breach of the law unless that country or territory ensures an adequate level of protection for the rights and freedoms of data subjects in relation to the processing of personal data. So you can easily find yourself in breach of the law without realising it.

You can find the full Data Protection Act on

http://www.opsi.gov.uk/ACTS/acts1998/19980029.htm

It's very verbose and not for the faint hearted. It's certainly not necessary to digest it all but you should familiarise yourselves with the fundamentals of it.

You can find a more digestible summary of the basic points on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Act

If you understand it's basic principles and apply a little common sense when dealing with other people's data, then it's not something you should lose sleep over.

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Lawrence

You need to be very careful what info you do actually store on anyone, regardless if it is stored on computer or not.
They are entitled, under the data protection act, to request what information you do store on them.i remember when this all came in, I shan;t say who I worked for at the time, but we had weeks of overtime data cleansing records! We basically had to destroy any paper records that had 'bad' comments about 'clients' then we had to repeat it all again on the computer records a few years later.
You will find some large organisations automatically data cleanse their systems and also advise their staff to only ever record facts, NEVER opinions.
So not making notes like 'Mr- Smith with the bad breath'

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