14 DAY TRIAL // The website of the UK Metropolitan Police is filled with information that probably should not be posted for anyone to access and read.
According to AccessDocs, a large number of documents are currently online, containing all sorts of info that should not be available for the public to view and utilize.
The Disclosure Log page of their site is normally purposed for Freedom of Information Requests or for the force to answer questions coming from the citizens. However, it also contains names, email addresses, employment details and in some cases even whole paragraphs of personal information.
It seems as currently 105 files include privacy breaches, among which data on a former police officer, a professor, an American student and a journalist.
As the number of Freedom of Information requests grows, the ability of the Met Police's employees to keep track of what ends up on the internet diminishes.
One of the problems might be that the agency does not have a dedicated FOI team which handles the demands, the largest part of the task being performed by the Public Access Office, which currently deploys 15 employees to deal with such acts.
The work they do to catch cyber and non-cyber villains must be praised, but on the other hand, in an era where privacy is the key to a person's well-being, they should place a higher importance on the secrecy of those who interact with them.
It's clear that not everyone might be happy with their private data made public when they submit a document to the police and I hope in the future they will deploy better regulations regarding the handling of info.
Internet users have a hard time learning they should be very cautious with the things they share online and public institutions should not make the task even more difficult.