Following a ruling by the Court of Appeal, businesses will now only have to search manual files -- that is, ones that are not stored electronically -- for information that is indexed so that it can be easily identified as containing information about the individual requesting it.
The ruling has been welcomed by the Direct Marketing Association. In a statement, the body said: "The DMA welcomes this clarification of the law, which will reduce the burden on businesses in dealing with such requests."
The ruling comes after the case of Durant versus the Financial Services Authority. It covers an organisation's response to a data subject access request under Section 7 of the Data Protection Act 1998.
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