Source: "Blic"
Citizens are increasingly addressing the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection with requests to protect the right to personal data protection. The most recent example of this is the case of “arguments” between parents and schools in connection with data collection for the “Single Information System in Primary and Secondary Education in the Republic of Serbia”. People do not understand on what basis certain data are requested from them and who needs them and why. They fail to understand, for example, who and why needs information about whether they are married, single or divorced, about their ethnicity, about whether they are hired into indefinite or fixed-term employment etc. and they demand explanations, and rightly so. They receive various “explanations”, which they often find difficult to accept. The following explanation forwarded to me by a parent is certainly one of the most “creative” ones: “If such data are not entered in the database, children will de facto not be treated as pupils in the Serbian education system, they will simply not exist!!”
Can we allow this to happen in a country where personal data protection is guaranteed under Article 2 of the Constitution, which also explicitly stipulates that collection, keeping, processing and use of data must be regulated by the law?
We do not all have the share the same opinion about the necessity of the “Single Information System in Primary and Secondary Education in the Republic of Serbia” or any other personal data file. And even if we agree that such data file should exist, we do not have to agree with the type and volume of the data which are being collected. But this is exactly why one thing must be undisputable in connection with this and any other case of personal data processing – they all have to be regulated by the law.
People who give their personal data are fully entitled to know why, to whom, to what extent and for what purpose they are needed. And they also have the right to know when they are under obligation to give their personal data and when giving of personal data is expression of their free will. Answers to these questions must not be provisional, they have to be regulated by a relevant law. Failing that, no “answer” is good enough and threats and intimidations (whether serious or not) are even less so. They are absolutely inadmissible.
