The survey questioned 100 IT directors of the UK’s top 2,000 organisations and found that, in contrast with other data abuse issues such as spam, the way in which IT departments use customer data has been “greatly overlooked.”
According to the findings, 13% of the sample viewed the 1998 Data Protection Act as “being outside of their area of responsibility”, whilst as much as 47% stated that they were “only vaguely familiar” with the Act.
Ian Clark, Director of Enterprise Management Solutions, Compuware EMEA, said:
“Using customer data to ensure that an IT system designed to process customer data is working properly would seem to make good sense. However, companies that indulge in this practice are not only compromising their customers’ rights and opening themselves up to prosecution and hefty times, they’re also at risk of damaging their corporate reputations if test documents such as invoices find their way out to real customers.”