Pension, Mortgage and Insurance Records
 |
||
|
Records of transactions for long-lived financial products and services contracted between individuals and corporations. These records typically contain or depend on significant amounts of personal information and outlast the infrastructure on which they were created. |
||
|
Group: Sensitive Data |
Trend in 2023:
|
Consensus Decision |
|
Added to List: 2017 |
Trend in 2024:
|
Previously: Vulnerable |
|
Imminence of Action Action is recommended within three years, detailed assessment within one year. |
Significance of Loss The loss of tools, data or services within this group would impact on many people and sectors. |
Effort to Preserve | Inevitability It would require a small effort to preserve materials in this group, requiring the application of proven tools and techniques. |
|
Examples Applications, correspondence and ancillary records relating to pensions, mortgages and insurances and other contracts of long duration. This includes corporate databases, email, web archives and EDRMS, and may require some coordination of paper, microfiche, born-digital and digitized records. These records often include the scope and duration of the contract as well as any agreed changes during the lifetime of the product. It may also include evidence of mis-selling or other sharp practice, which only becomes apparent after the fact. This entry pertains to corporate records rather than personal records. |
||
|
‘Endangered’ in the Presence of Aggravating Conditions Lack of corporate preservation planning; lack of preservation within the procurement of corporate systems; companies conflating backup with preservation; loss of integrity and authenticity; loss of context and connections to provide meaning; lack of preservation capability within agencies; lack of preservation voice at executive level; poor planning and roadmap for corporate infrastructure; proliferation of legacy systems; slapdash procurement or migration of new systems; mergers and acquisitions leading to confusion of corporate systems; lack of compliance, audit or accountability at operational levels; encryption; Uncertainty over IPR or the presence of orphaned works owners. |
||
|
‘Lower Risk’ in the Presence of Good Practice Backup and documentation; use of open formats and open source software; considered data management planning; licencing that enables preservation; preservation capability in designated repository; resilient to hacking; selection and appraisal in place; authenticity and integrity of records managed; resilient funding and recognition at executive level; technology watch; regular preservation audits; accreditation and participation in the professional preservation community. |
||
|
2023 Review This entry was added in 2017 but was outside the competence of the judges to assess at that time. It was assessed in 2019 with additional expertise invited to the panel to support this assessment and reviewed again in 2020. The 2021 Jury agreed with the 2019 assessment and subsequent 2020 review, which classified these digital materials as Vulnerable with no trend towards greater or reduced risk. The 2023 Council agreed with the Vulnerable classification with the overall risks remaining on the same basis as before (‘No change’ to trend). |
||
|
2024 Interim Review The 2024 Council recommends that a major rescoping of the Sensitive Data species is necessary, with plans to remove it as a species and incorporate key elements and examples to relevant entries for the next 2025 Bit List. This is because it is not clear how sensitive data works as a species, when many of the other species mentioned could have sensitive data concerns, and the sensitivity of the data is more like an extra category of risk that potentially applies across any species. |
||
|
Additional Comments The importance of retaining documentation in any kind of legal agreement offers this kind of material more protection than most but legal organizations may conflate backup with preservation and not always have consistent records management systems. See also:
|
||
No Change