NEWS & UPDATES

If a company sends an email that is intended for you, but it goes to someone else’s email address then this is a data protection breach if the blame is on the company.

If the company has mixed up email addresses and sent your correspondence to another customer, or perhaps they noted the incorrect email address when you provided it to them; these are the scenarios for breaches.

But, what about compensation claims in these kinds of scenarios?
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If you’ve ever been left wondering just how the latest marketing company managed to get hold of your information, the reason can actually be very simple.

There are loads of companies out there who hold your data, and some may pass on or sell your data for profit; even when they’re not actually allowed to. Sometimes, it can be a lack of understanding as to how the data laws work, but most of the time it’s probably just a way of making easy money on the basis that they hope they won’t be caught.

But the UK’s data watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), is often on the case!
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75 MILLION nuisance calls!

You can probably guess what the nature of the calls were as well, right? It’s not hard to guess when pretty much everyone in the UK has been hit with these automated calls by companies who are desperate to find people to make PPI claims.

The company at the centre of this massive breach, the aptly named Miss-sold Products UK Ltd, reportedly made the automated marketing calls between November 2015 and March 2016, and they were the standard and annoying automated voice calls trying to push people to make PPI claims.
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There are masses of medical data stored on servers around the world and unfortunately hackers manage to find ways into these storage systems and gain access to this highly sensitive data.

This can be particularly relevant in the U.S., where their healthcare system means records are managed by a number of private organisations, or sourced to private entities whose responsibility is to manage medical records for several healthcare institutes. Although such ease of access can be beneficial from a medical perspective, the danger is the growing exposure of medical data to being hacked.
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The government has warned of the increased fines organisations face for breaching Data Protection rules from May 2018, which could see fines as high as £17m.

Utility firms, transport firms, the healthcare sector and infrastructure companies are being warned to develop more robust safeguards to defend themselves from data breaches and cyberattacks, or face the costly consequences.

With mandatory reporting and massive fines being implemented in the next few months, the warnings cannot fall on deaf ears.
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Last October, the Australian Red Cross Blood Service had 1.74 GB of backup data compromised. This reportedly included 1.3 million rows and 645 tables containing personal information belonging to some 550,000 online blood donor applications.

The following details were reportedly made publicly available: Name; Gender; Postal address; Email address; Gender; Phone number; Date of Birth; Country of Birth; Blood Type; Type of donation.

Other information relating to blood donations like donor eligibility answers and appointments were also revealed. Some of this can certainly be classed as very sensitive information indeed.
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The Police Federation for Northern Ireland (PFNI) has called for a full inquiry after they were alerted to a data breach that may have put lives at risk.

The inquiry was prompted after a former investigating officer who worked at the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland (PONI) was arrested for allegedly stealing sensitive information. The information is believed to have security details and identification of service police officers.

Needless to say, this data in the wrong hands could put lives in danger…
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Data privacy is getting more and more important, but it seems as though governmental authorities are becoming more and more lax on the matter.

Last month we possibly saw the death of U.S. citizens’ privacy rights in America. Although we’re here in the UK, this is relevant to us, because we still share so many ideals with our American counterparts, and we work with them a lot.

More often than not, the big worldwide breaches are affecting us both, and worldwide privacy rights is something we should all be concerned about.
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In the past few decades, technology has come on leaps and bounds. You can drive cars without steering them, switch appliances off at home without being in the house, and even book GP appointments and view your medical records using a mobile portal!

But just because the technology is there, it doesn’t necessarily mean people trust it enough to use it.

A recent study was made to see just how much people trusted using health technology portals to process their medical data. Generally speaking, the study revealed that a huge majority of us are sceptical of such technology, mostly because we fear data breaches.
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Although the U.K. voted to leave the EU in June’s referendum, this doesn’t seem to have altered the government’s plan to adopt strict EU data protection laws; namely the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

This Regulation will come into force on the 25 May 2018 with the aim of helping organisations and companies to understand the legal framework in the EU. There are some similarities with the U.K.’s Data Protection Act (DPA), but the new GDPR seems to be more stringent.
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Thank you to the saviours that are the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)!

There has been a recent uproar when WhatsApp’s privacy terms and conditions changed to allow their parent company, Facebook, to access its users’ personal details, which included phone numbers.

The ICO has recently intervened in the Facebook-WhatsApp data sharing agreement and have managed to ‘pause’ the agreement for the time being.
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Making an analysis of domain names at the time of registration is thought to be an effective way in the early detection for potential cyber-attacks and spam messages in the future.

This was noticed by American professors and the International Computer Science Institute who created the system PREDATOR: Proactive Recognition and Elimination of Domain Abuse at Time-Of-Registration.
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