There' a y in the day, so clearly it is time for another National Records of Scotland disaster story...
There has seemingly been a major screw-up with ScotlandsPeople (www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk) - details of thousands of historic adoptions were listed on the site, with original surnames of children prior to their adoptions able to be identified, albeit not easily. It's about as serious a breach of privacy as you can get. Readers will be reassured that the NRS is investigating what it has described as an 'extremely serious' situation.
For more on the story, currently the main BBC website news story for the UK, visit https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-66448432.
UPDATE: The story about the adoption records access is a bit more complicated than a simple data breach, because there has been no data breach, as such. What has happened is that it has been possible up to this point to see whether someone has been adopted because a search on the ScotlandsPeople birth register for that person's name is returned with 'NRH' and 'AR' in the index details (standing for 'New Register House' and 'Adoption Register'). The concern raised has been that if you then search for that person's first name in the birth register, assuming it was kept by the adoptive parents after an adoption, then it might be possible to identify the original birth record for that individual, especially if the forename was quite unusual – basically a process of jigsaw identification.
Considering that adoption records are sealed by the courts precisely to avoid it being easy to identify the original birth parents and circumstances of an adoption, there appears to be a conflict between two different statutory provisions. The NRS has a statutory duty to make available its public registers, but the question here seems to be whether the information about someone being on the adoption register should be available online (or indeed at all?). According to the BBC, the NRS has responded by removing the information from the online site whilst it carries out a review – I'm not sure if that also applies to on-site centres, but in the past it has always been possible to look up the adoption register in Edinburgh. If a child has been adopted, this is noted on the left side of the original birth entry.
It will be interesting to see how the NRS deals with this.
* Certificate ordering has been currently suspended by ScotlandsPeople, it is not known if this is related to the same issue.
Further update 11/8: The NRH/AR entries cannot be viewed at a ScotlandsPeople access centre either, it's not just online. The certificate ordering facility will apparently be resumed today, it was unconnected with the adoption records issue (with thanks to Jean Dickson).
Chris
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I discovered this a month or so ago, at Hawick Heritage Hub, and informed the Archivists. I had found the death of a young lady, though the parents were not as expected, so looked for a birth to be confronted by three records, one, had NRH against so unable to access, but the other was for Birth Parents named, and a note to say adopted, the second was the adopted parents being named. Shocking that it should be that easy to discover.
ReplyDeleteChris, If this shows how easy to search, feel free not to publish, I don't think we want a rush of people searching for this sort of information. Unfair on everyone involved.
To be honest, I think I mentioned how to do this in one of my books a couple of years back, without twigging the consequences. Right now it can't be done, as the NRS has now removed the records, but as I mentioned there are conflicting legal issues here, the statutory role of NRS in making records available, and the court process to protect identities being discovered. As one colleague of mine commented, the ability to do such searches is handy when doing research for charities such as Birthlink. My hope is that there isn't an over-reaction by the NRS (i.e. all birth indexes less than 100 years old removed, as is the case with the 2 Irish sites offering online access to civil registration records). I think there needs to be some restrictions on online access, but it will be interesting to see what the solution is.
DeleteI'm not sure that there is a solid solution. Theoretically we should have access to birth certificates to independently check that someone is who they say they are. Redacting BCs linked to adoptions might not be the answer as the gap acts to alert us that things are not as expected - one answer for which might be adoption. And the redaction also destroys the ability to check.
ReplyDeleteThanks for providing some more information than was in the news articles. Now I think that what happened is due to the changes implemented by CACI when they took over the site from Findmypast. They removed the charge to view search results and removed the requirement for a surname to be used in searches. Before that change was made, you would have had to know both the birth surname and the adoptive surname to be able to find both records.
ReplyDelete