I used to be the IT Director for a document scanning business in the UK.<p>Scanning paper HR records was the single most painful job we had to do. The entire file became a complete legal nightmare purely because it stopped being paper and became covered by Data Protection.<p>Usually the HR department had to go through every single employee file and shred any documents that might be grounds for legal action before they got scanned.<p>The process before scanning was:
- employee is annoyed
- employee requests their HR file
- HR sanitise file and sends it to employee<p>after scanning, every single page was indexed. So they couldn&#x27;t react to a request by destroying pages (because there&#x27;d be holes in the index). So they had to sanitise every single file before scanning.<p>I understand the point of Data Protection law, but in this case it was really counter-productive. Evidence was destroyed wholesale.