The Information Commissioners Office has fined transgender charity Mermaids £25,000 for failing to keep the personal data of its users secure. The ICO found that Mermaids (a charity which offers support to children/young adults and their families in relation to gender non-conformity) breached users’ data by failing to implement appropriate security and technical measures to [...]
Oxford City Council have apologized to local residents following a data breach that occurred at the end of July 2021. Up to 80 residents received letters from the Council containing rent statements intended for others. One resident said: “I received a letter that was addressed to my address but not with my name. I mistakenly [...]
It has been reported that MG, a physiotherapist working at Liverpool Women’s Hospital lost two boxes of patient records, which he removed from the Hospital premises to conduct his own clinical trial. The physio has now been suspended for running the trial without proper authorisation. MG used Hospital consent forms to obtain patient approval to [...]
Back in April of this year New Forest District Council reported a data breach which occurred in 2018, when a member of the public submitted a request to the local authority through the website www.whatdotheyknow.com. The website helps people with their Freedom of Information Act requests and then publishes the results online. The FOI request [...]
But they really have to up their game when it comes to protecting our data A report last month in the Guardian confirmed that “NHS Digital is revising its process for booking Covid vaccinations in England after the discovery of a ‘seriously shocking failure’ that leaked medical data from the site. The website lets users make appointments [...]
It is no secret that the healthcare sector experiences the highest number of data breaches annually. And the sector has become even more attractive to cyber criminals (and even more prone to human errors) given that, in recent months, health organisations have had to focus on the Coronavirus pandemic. The NHS and all related health [...]
Data breaches by schools and universities have been on the rise in the previous 12 months, demonstrating a continuing failure by the educational sector to come to terms with the data protection obligations imposed by the May 2018 General Data Protection Regulation (now the UK GDPR). Universities are prime targets. In May of 2020, cyber [...]
Information relating to our health is often of an extremely personal and confidential nature and is classified as special category data under data protection law. This means (generally speaking) that it cannot be disclosed without the consent of the patient. Yet data breaches by the NHS and healthcare organisations remain the most common data breach [...]
Birmingham City Council has suffered a serious data breach incident in which information relating to “vulnerable” children. Their data was mistakenly uploaded to a Brum account, a website that allows taxpayers to access services offered by the local authority. The authority has said that the breach happened as a result of human error – with [...]
The ICO has recently published figures for the health care sector data breaches in the period 1/7/20 to 30/9/20 which show that, once again, the health sector is top of the league when it comes to data breach. During that period 442 heath sector data breaches came to the attention of the ICO. This suggests [...]