Struggling with GDPR compliance? Don't waste money on legal advice: Buy a shredder There is, it seems, no deterring the General Data Protection Regulation snake-oil sellers, who will happily stick "GDPR compliant" onto whatever they have to hand – including shredders, bins and visitor books. As Google has recently learned, failing to meet the requirements of the GDPR can be costly – so it's no surprise …
Depends.
The frequencies that are used for digital / DVB-T / Freeview now are not exactly the same as those used for analogue TV (471 - 853 MHz in theory but we only had five channels, remember, and so many of those upper channels were never used - I think London TV never went past channel 31 or so, IIRC out of 69).
However, digital TV needs a much better signal than analogue ever did. And even Channel 5 had to have a massive "retune" event pre-launch because not everyone's equipment was set up to receive the frequencies it went out on (VCRs often used the same channel!). So even pre-digital, if you were trying to get Channel 5 you may well find that the aerial you had that had served you for decades was suddenly no use for receiving that, and you'd have needed a new one.
Same happened on digital conversion. Now, all aerials would be "not fit for purpose" if they weren't able to pick up all the digital frequencies (as they change and retune quite often, and you can easily be in the reception area of two transmitters and get two entirely different frequencies from two different directions and try to make the best of what you can receive). Hence, the "digital" aerials aren't any "different" in terms of how they operate but they may well have to conform to stricter criteria and certainly you want the aerial you buy to say digital on it, in case it's a pre-digital aerial that *wasn't* built with those frequencies in mind (it could have been on a shelf untouched for decades!).
Please note I'm able to pick up Hemel and Crystal Palace from my HUGE LONDON TOWN home but I need a signal booster to get anything like decent reception on digital. I even bought a full loft aerial kit, it was actually worse, even with the booster. My neighbours all have the exact same problem. And yet if I swizzle my aerial around, I can pick up both transmitters in near-opposite directions at about the same strength (I do love the mapping now that shows you where they are and where your building is oriented - some of my neighbours are picking up one, some the other, and some are pointing god-knows-where!).
Anyone who was just relying on their old aerial in that area, when digital switchover was happening, would have needed not only a new aerial but also a serious booster, just to get a bare signal.
Currently, tuned to Crystal Palace, I get this as one of my best channels:
Lock (0x1f) Quality= Good Signal= -39.88dBm C/N= 29.03dB UCB= 0 postBER= 0 preBER= 61.0x10^-6 PER= 0
Without the booster, I get no signal lock, and things drop to less than 10dB. With a brand-new-huge in-loft aerial, no booster, I get less than 10dB. With a brand-new in-loft aerial, with booster, I get about 20dB (which means things sometimes break up, and certain channels don't come in at all).
Digital really knocked signal reception for six. A "digital aerial" is a thing that can be vastly different to anything that existed pre-digital. If I tried to pull that stuff it with whatever aerial was here pre-digital, I'd get absolutely nothing whatsoever. But neighbours tell me that analogue TV was fine all the time that was around.
"Digital really knocked signal reception for six."
That's because most people had the cheapest aerials they could get away with. ISTR the Maplin catalogue used have a few pages specifically about the various transmitters around the country and which bands they used so you could select the correct aerial. I paid a little extra for an "all band" aerial 30 odd years ago and it's till working well with Freeview. Having said that, it's on the roof and we are in a good signal area.
Strange. When the US made the switch to DTV my existing aerial did just fine. I went from 5 clearish channels and 2-3 colored static ones to about 30 crystal clear channels. I was also able to pull in clear channels from cities over 200 miles away if I spun the antenna just right, and that was with no signal booster. The antenna was mounted outside the house though, and covered about 10 square feet of space total.
One of my clients is in a Business Centre that has one of these.
My question is: how do you Sign Out at the end of your visit, as you have no way of knowing which is the entry you made upon entering the building? What I would think to do is to have two entries for each person's visit, with the "Time In" recorded on the first entry, and the "Time Out" on the second entry. This is not, however how they were using it. Hmm, spot of GDPR Consultancy there, I feel.
EDIT: The example linked to in the topic is not the same type as the one I saw, which was a line by line entry with Name, Who Visiting, Car Reg. The only visible boxes were Time In and Time Out.
I read up on GDPR and gave a reasonable heads up to a multi office consumer facing client, but it seemed that what I said couldn't possibly be right so they got a chap in at great expense which essentially repeated what I said and also gave them some long policy document which was specific to them. Nope, it turned out was a straight lift of documents that other companies had posted on the internet and this guy simply changed the company name.
With no e-mail retention. That way you can claim "If people request FOI's we can just claim we no longer have the data". That was what I heard a data protection officer claim in a certain local governement department. Despite requiring to keep some e-mails for years, Gsuite e-mail retention was just too expensive. Which would ruin the false claim that Gsuite was cheaper than Microsoft 365 or onsite volume license.
As a local government DP person I'm calling bullsh!t on this.
The DP person wouldn't have said it, their boss or a Director would have said it then expected the DP Person to make it happen - trust me I know as I was once that person who had to make it happen. I also made sure I retained all of the emails about it where I told the Director what we were doing was non-compliant but as I wasn't far enough up the food chain I was ignored and told to do it anyway.
Fortunately I was never told to destroy docs after I explained doing that to avoid disclosure was a criminal offence!
As an aside the keeping some emails for years claim is also unlikely to be an FOI issue as in local government the majority of information with long term retention requirements are safeguarding/social care related so are personal data and can be withheld from an FOI anyway.
I can remember a face but never a name (seriously I've worked for years in companies before not knowing the name of any but my most frequently communicated with colleagues).
That said I'm not sure about my home CCTV system though it does empty itself after 3 months so it should be OK I think..
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