Privacy watchdog clears exams body over charges
The privacy watchdog on Thursday dismissed complaints the local exams regulator had violated privacy laws by overcharging public exam candidates for their marking records and exam script checks.  The law stipulates that organisations cannot charge a fee higher than the lowest possibly imposed for people seeking a copy of their personal data. Last year, the Examinations and Assessment Authority turned electronic and stopped providing hard copies for those seeking their records. It lowered the fee for checking the first subject by HK$20 to HK$380, and kept the fee for each additional subject unchanged at HK$104. Four candidates who sat last year's DSE exams then filed complaints to the Privacy Commissioner, saying they were charged too much. After an investigation, privacy commissioner Ada Chung said the fees charged were already lower than the directly related necessary costs, such as those for payroll and computer operating time. "The commissioner found that the fees imposed by the [authority] for complying with the data access requests were not excessive and it had not contravened [the ordinance]," she said in a statement. One complainant also argued the exams body had been overcharging for a decade starting from 2012, saying it actually retained scanned copies of the records but only gave people hard copies. But Chung also said this was unsubstantiated, saying the authority was only providing the data in one form and therefore didn't violate the law.