Question
Can the Chief Constable confirm whether the PSNI media reports compiled by the Corporate Communications Department as part of environmental scanning contain personal information about individuals and groups who criticise or otherwise comment on police activity, rather than reports being limited to considering the issues that have been raised?
How long are such reports retained for and is the Chief Constable satisfied that the retention of reports and information which identifies individuals is in line with legislative requirements
Answer
The Police Service of Northern Ireland’s Strategic Communication and Engagement Department conducts general social media monitoring in relation to community sentiment. This is distinct from the Service’s law enforcement and intelligence gathering function. The purpose is to gauge public sentiment, reviewing attitudes to policing activity and monitoring trends over time to help assess the impact of policing activity in general or in response to specific matters. There is a business need to do this as part of police engagement and consideration of the effectiveness of policing activities and not as a form of any indirect surveillance or large scale harvesting of data.
The Strategic Communication and Engagement Department do not monitor individual social media accounts.
Some of the public domain content captured in reports may hold personal data of members of the public. We will only hold personal information for as long as is necessary for our business purpose. In doing this we aim to comply with the third data protection principle in the General Data Protection Regulation 2018, which is a data minimisation principle and sets out that we (Police Service of Northern Ireland) should only hold information for as long as is necessary.
The third principle states:
Personal data shall be "adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which they are processed" (Article 5 (1) (c) GDPR 2018)
We retain this information to monitor trends, highlight shifts of public opinion, gauge the sentiment of community advocates and assess the public mood in relation to general views on policing or about specific matters which may be continuously changing.
Following a review of the Strategic Communication and Engagement Department’s policy on information, the retention schedule was amended to take better account of the Third Data Protection Principle, and further minimise retention to a period of two years.
Partnership Committee