The Privacy and Civil Liberties Policy Development Guide and Implementation Templates addresses the development of privacy and civil liberties policies to ensure proper gathering and sharing of accurate personally identifiable information. Justice entities must recognize that despite the implementation of an effective policy, damage and harm can still occur if the underlying information is deficient in quality.
What Is Information Quality?
Information quality can be defined as the accuracy and validity of the actual content of the data, data structure, and database/data repository design. The elements of information quality are accuracy, completeness, currency, reliability, and context/meaning.
Impact of Information Quality on Privacy and Public Access
Gathering and providing access to inaccurate information is not a public service; in fact, it can be a public and personal injustice. In developing the privacy and civil liberties policy, it is important that justice organizations address information quality in concert with privacy and civil liberties issues. Data quality is specifically enumerated as an issue to be considered in the privacy design principles (refer to Section 7.2.4.1.2, "Information Quality Relative to Collection and Maintenance of Information"). In practice, the accuracy, completeness, currency, and reliability of information connected to an individual may raise as many concerns as the release of the information or its public availability.
Information Quality Guidance
An agency must address the intersection of information quality and security with privacy. DOJ's Global Privacy and Information Quality Working Group (GPIQWG) plans to develop and make available additional information quality resources in an ongoing commitment to improve the quality of information law enforcement and public safety officials rely on every day. The first resource in this series, entitled Information Quality: The Foundation for Justice Decision Making, is currently available and is described in Section 10.4.1.