When Maintaining the Pivacy of Personal Data Can Close the Door On Marriage

I try and set myself regular goals both in my private and my professional life. Something happened to me recently which highlighted an unexpected contradiction in my goalsetting approach and showed that freedom is an essential ingredient to happiness in every part of one's life. My recent experience does have a humorous angle to it in the sense that it might give a desperate individual reason not to get married. However for me it represented a conflict between something that I try and observe on a daily basis as part of maintaining high standards and achieving one of the happiest goals in my life. I work as a specialist in secure data destruction. That means that on a day to day basis I am charged with destroying sensitive information about private individuals, companies and government agencies so that it does not get into the wrong hands. Most of the time I am involved in shredding hard drives, data tapes and mobile phones. Data Disposal is physical and demanding work. Sometimes I am involved in advising customers about data protection and relevant legislation. It is through this latter part of my work that I have come to be aware of data security and how it affects us in our daily lives. This means that I take you note when companies asked me to submit personal information on a form or to their website. This information might include my home address and my date of birth for example. So I am regularly pointing out the daily challenge of protecting oneself from the ever growing crime of identity theft to my friends and family. My awareness of these issues and came to a head the other day in the most unexpected place. I am due to get married in a couple of months time and obviously, on a personal level, this marks the fulfilment of a major life goal. My fiancee and I attended the local registry office last week where we have to complete a process of preregistration before marriage. This involved paying a fee and filling in a detailed form which included significant confidential data such as name and address, date of birth, personal occupation, name of Father, fathers occupation and so on. And in many cases when handing over these kind of details I often use of false date of birth where it is not significant to the acceptance of an application for example. In this case I felt I could not do that. On the way into the registry office we had walked past a large electronic noticeboard displaying the names, addresses and dates of birth of all of the people due to be married in our municipality in the coming months. This I thought at the time presented a fantastic opportunity for criminals. When I was completing the forms in the registrar's office I looked carefully at the paperwork to see if there was a data protection statement which is required under the data protection act 1998 . There wasn't one. (A data protection statement explains to you how the organisation concerned will protect your confidential information.) I said to the registrar that I worked in On Site Data Destruction and I did not wish for my personal data to be displayed on their electronic board. She said to me that this was not possible it was a legal requirement that the sensitive we be shown for a period of 16 days before we were due to get married. Her supervisor was called and reiterated the same point. It's the law she said. I explained that the data protection act was also the law but it became starkly apparent that if I wanted to get married, I wouldI have to comply. The only other alternative would have been to launch a lawsuit against the registrar which would have taken months. I find this situation very disappointing and frustrating. In this instance, I'm trying to achieve two things that are important but the state prevents me from doing so. Has anyone else suffered similar frustrations.