Titbits – Information superslowway
◆ Hackney Council was effusive in its excitement about Abney Park cemetery being reduced from Heritage At Risk’s list of endangered properties, but Titbits can’t help but wonder if it also tried to bury news about the nearby Stoke Newington Town Hall being added at the same swoop. After being entirely silent on the matter, it took a query from the Citizen to finally get the council to acknowledge this inconvenient truth. It’s all about taking control of the narrative, apparently!
◆ The row over Pembury Circus continues as the council unveiled its new CGI plans for the junction, following the Hackney Cycling Campaign’s unsuccessful bid to get them to take another look at the decision. The council pointed to its straw poll on Instagram showing that 61 per cent of people backed its plans. A cursory glance showed just 151 people had responded to the poll, with the council later acknowledging that it “was not representative of Hackney Central”. Go figure.
◆ Hackney Council’s Interim Head of Information Governance and Data Protection Officer, James Scott, has been struggling to grasp LinkedIn’s privacy settings: “I have my profile visibility turned off so people don’t know I’ve viewed their profile. I’ve just finished a free trial of LinkedIn Premium and those who viewed my profile were *always* named,” he opined. “Does buying Premium mean you effectively override people’s privacy settings?” Clearly, confusion reigns as his ramblings were very much available to all. Enjoy at your leisure.
◆ “I was recently lucky enough to procure Smartbox [… it’s] ridiculously helpful with FOI [requests] …,” crowed Scott, singing the praises of his latest data privacy toy. It seems he could have done with it a year earlier, as the Information Commissioner ruled just last month that Hackney Council breached section 16 of the Freedom of Information Act by failing to obtain the correct objective reading of a request made on 20 November 2023 by this newspaper. The council was ordered to contact the Hackney Citizen to clarify the request within 30 calendar days of 17 October 2024. Meanwhile, Scott is happy to publicly reassure us all, via LinkedIn, that he is a contractor and so anticipates he’ll “be leaving the organisation end of this year/early next year”.