Security News
The UK's Information Commissioner's Office has opened a consultation on "Consent or pay" business models. While the ICO studiously avoided naming any companies or organizations in particular, one of the most famous examples of the practice comes from Meta, which asked EU subscribers to choose between either paying to lose ads and allow data processing for advertising.
A financial services company that illegally dispatched tens of thousands of spam messages promising to help the recipients magically wipe away their debts is itself now a debtor to the UK's data regulator. Free Debt Help can consolidate your unaffordable payments, write off up to 85 percent of your total debt Check if you qualify text HELP or Stop2Stop.
The UK data watchdog has penalized five businesses it says collectively made 1.9 million cold calls to members of the public, illegally, as those people had opted out of being menaced at home by marketeers. Anyone registered with the Telephone Preference Service in the UK should not receive calls from organizations, unless they've expressly given consent.
UK's Information Commissioner's Office, together with eleven data protection and privacy authorities from around the world, have published a statement calling social media platforms to up their protections against data scrapers. Data scraping is the process of extracting large amounts of publicly available data from websites using automated tools such as bots, collecting information that users have published on that platform.
UK's Information Commissioner's Office, together with eleven data protection and privacy authorities from around the world, have published a statement calling social media platforms to up their protections against data scrapers. Data scraping is the process of extracting large amounts of publicly available data from websites using automated tools such as bots, collecting information that users have published on that platform.
More than half of data protection fines issued by the Information Commissioner's Office over the last two years, totalling more than £5m, have not been paid. The SMS Works pointed out that fines to home improvements companies appear to be least likely to be paid, with £1.6m in fines issued to these firms resulting in just £280,000 being repaid to date.
The dodgy use of personal data by rogue organisations in fraud and scams continues to be the biggest data protection bugbear for people in the UK, according to research from the Information Commissioners Office. What's more, organisations with a poor record on keeping people's data safe or not using it properly - such as those who pepper the public with unwanted marketing calls - are likely to find themselves scratched off people's Xmas card list.
The UK's data watchdog has issued £480,000 in financial penalties to four businesses that illegally made 2.4 million marketing calls to members of the public registered with the Telephone Preference Services. In the case of Chameleon Marketing, it made 617,323 direct marketing calls to people registered with TPS between 17 March and 2 July 2019.
Key to the criminals' success was Ticketmaster's decision to deploy a Javascript-powered chatbot on its website payment pages, giving criminals an easy way in by compromising the third party's JS - something the ICO held against Ticketmaster in its decision to award the fine. Ticketmaster 'fessed up to world+dog in June that year, and the final damage has now been revealed by the Information Commissioner's Office: 9.4m people's data was "Potentially affected" of which 1.5m were in the UK; 66,000 credit cards were compromised and had to be replaced; and Ticketmaster itself doesn't know how many people were affected between 25 May and 23 June 2018.
The UK's ruling Conservative Party has been using personal data in a way that spots an individual's likely county of origin, ethnic origin and religion based on their first and last name. According to an ICO report, the Tory party purchased so-called "Estimated onomastic data" and appended it to the records of 10 million voters.