Home > yourrights > the right to know/data protection act > data protection act/subject access under the act > subject access under the act
> Personal data
Personal data
You can only access information about yourself if this information is considered personal data. Personal data is data which is about you and which allows you to be identified, either from the data or from the data together with other information which is also held by the person holding the data.
Following a Court of Appeal decision in 2003 (Durant v. Financial Services Authority), the Information Commissioner issued more detailed guidance on the meaning of personal data. In particular the Court considered that data would only be personal data of a particular individual if it had that individual as its focus or was biographical in a significant way. This means that mere mention of an individual in a document does not necessarily mean that the document is the individual's personal data - there has to be something more that.
The Information Commissioner has produced a step by step to identifying what is personal data, which is available here.
However, if someone holds information about you which is sufficiently interesting for you to want to access it, the likelihood is that it will be personal data. So if information about you is held by your doctor, by your bank, by a credit reference agency, by your employer or by the tax-man, the likelihood is that it will be your personal data.
