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Should the ICO have greater powers? This is one of the many questions being asked as we continue to swim through the wreck of the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica data scandal.
It’s understood that the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO for short) were in the midst of complex investigations surrounding the use of data in political campaigns when the scandal broke. The ICO are asking for greater powers to allow them to keep up with the pace of developments in such matters, and with the GDPR that came into force last month that empowers regulators to be able to better audit any organisations using data – which, let’s face it, is all of us really – should the ICO have greater powers still?
A former Recruitment Consultant has been fined and criminally charged after he illegally obtained data from a job he left.
According to the ICO’s publication report, Daniel Short left a recruitment firm he had been working for, VetPro Recruitment, toward the end of last year and then established his own company named VetSelect.
With his former employee having concerns about the obvious similarities of the companies, and the fact that they hold the data for more than 16,000 vets and nurses for recruitment purposes, they investigated whether Mr Short had taken any data before he left.
The UK’s data watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), has reportedly only collected half of data breach fines since 2010.
One of the major problems the ICO is apparently facing is the organisations who are responsible for the data breaches going into liquidation and avoiding large fines, which the ICO has little power to stop. Despite the ICO asking the government for the power to enforce fines against company directors, something the government reportedly said they would look at in 2016, they remain unable to pass fines on to bosses, leaving a large loophole in the data breach justice system.
The ICO has issued “record fines” over an illegal trade of personal data that involved “rogue private investigators” illegally obtaining financial information for an individual who’d claimed on an insurance policy for a fire at a business premises they owned.
A director and a senior member of staff, together with the private investigators, have been hit with record fines for unlawfully obtaining and disclosing personal data. The investigation reportedly started in 2013 when the Serious Organised Crime Agency passed over a list of ‘blue chip’ clients of criminal private investigators to the ICO.
The WhatsApp agreement to stop sharing data with Facebook was hailed as a success for data protection rights when the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) investigated issues over consent for the sharing of data between the two platforms.
WhatsApp signed an undertaking (a formal agreement / promise) to confirm they would stop sharing data with Facebook until they could do so in compliance with this month’s GDPR changes.
Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014, but a move like that does not automatically allow for consent to share data.
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