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Password Sharing “Standard Practice” Among British MPs

Nadine Dorries, a British MP, has made news over the past few weeks after admitting on Twitter that she shares the password to her work PC with other staff in her office and even “interns on exchange programs”. According to Dorries, the main reason for this is that her staff can access a shared mailbox on the PC and reply to constituents. More worrying still, in wake of the backlash directed at Dorries, other MPs have come forward and admitted to the practice, revealing a worrying trend. In a further statement that showed up Dorries’ lack of data protection savvy, she tweeted that since she was backbench MP without access to government documents, there was nothing sensitive to access. Dorries (and hopefully all other MPs sharing their passwords) are in for a rude awakening, however, as not only is sharing passwords against the rules of parliament in the UK, but even information as basic as an address book constitutes Personally Identifiable Information (PII) which is subject to strong protection under existing data protection laws – and will be protected even more fiercely under the upcoming GDPR, even in the UK.

Password sharing may be standard practice among MPs, but it is far from best practice. Mailbox delegation could achieve the same productivity with a fraction of the risk.

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