Name of person who made previous FOI request FOI2012-A078

IPSA holds the information that you request.

In processing your request, we have considered whether the exemption at Section 40(2) of the FOI Act applies.  Section 40(2) of the FOIA provides that :

(2) Any information to which a request for information relates is also exempt information if—

(a) it constitutes personal data which do not fall within subsection (1), and

(b) either the first or the second condition below is satisfied.

(3) The first condition is—

(a) in a case where the information falls within any of paragraphs (a) to (d) of the definition of “data” in section 1(1) of the Data Protection Act 1998, that the disclosure of the information to a member of the public otherwise than under this Act would contravene—

(i) any of the data protection principles, or

(ii) section 10 of that Act (right to prevent processing likely to cause damage or distress), and

(b) in any other case, that the disclosure of the information to a member of the public otherwise than under this Act would contravene any of the data protection principles if the exemptions in section 33A(1) of the Data Protection Act 1998 (which relate to manual data held by public authorities) were disregarded.

We have considered whether the disclosure of the requested information would breach the First Data Protection Principle of the DPA.  The First Data Protection Principle provides that:

Personal data shall be processed fairly and lawfully and, in particular, shall not be processed unless—

(a) at least one of the conditions in Schedule 2 is met, and

(b) in the case of sensitive personal data, at least one of the conditions in Schedule 3 is also met.

As a result, we are withholding the identity of the requester, applying Section 40 of the Freedom of Information Act as we believe the requester’s identity constitutes personal data and release would contravene one of the data protection principles of the Data Protection Act, 1998. We consider that disclosure would breach the First Data Protection Principle of the DPA.