Google’s 50 million euro fine made headlines as the first fine to be issued under the GDPR and while many of us still wait to see many more GDPR fines make the headlines, in the past year Ireland has become one of Europe’s most high profile data watchdogs as major tech organisations like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Airbnb are registered for processing personal data in Ireland.
The Irish Data Protection Commission (‘DPC’) has seen a huge increase in awareness among individuals about what rights they have under the GDPR, as a result the DPC has launched a number of investigations into companies such as Twitter, Apple, WhatsApp and Instagram over the way they use personal data and the impact of targeted advertising. The UK has become one of the top three countries in Europe with the highest data breach notifications. A few cases of interest are:
- The ICO recently ordered HMRC to erase all biometric data it had collected since 2017 using a Voice ID system for which it did not have explicit consent. The ICO argued that HMRC had failed to give its customers sufficient information about how their data would be processed and had not been given the chance to give or withhold consent as a result. We are still waiting to see what financial penalty HMRC faces.
- A £120,000 fine was handed down to True Vision Productions for “unfair and unlawful” filming at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. While permission had been obtained from the hospital, patients had not been provided with sufficient information and there was no good reason for permission not to have been secured.
- A fine of almost half a million pounds was issued to Bounty, a parenting and pregnancy club, for the illegal sharing of personal information belonging to more than 14 million people with third parties that were not listed in Bounty’s privacy policy.
Although most monetary fines have been handed down under the old data protection regime, the ICO continues to warn us of the consequences of non compliance and we expect to see more coming through over the coming months.