Disappointing in the UK that two fines have been given to charities and NHS trusts trying to help trans people.
Seems an ugly front in the culture war.
Seems an ugly front in the culture war.
The only 'culture war' here is the one you are introducing.
I'm saying for the relatively few fines that have been issued in the UK, a surprising number have been aimed at targets of the culture war of the day and that that's noteworthy.
Data relating to medical records and sexuality is noted by the GDPR as (quite rightly) being particularly sensitive and worthy of extra protection.
Your use of the troll bait term "culture war" attempts to belie this.
I found the proportion of the fines aimed at a particular group of organisations noteworthy; especially specific organisations that are already under intense scrutiny in the UK media.
Charities have to obey privacy law the same as anybody else regardless of what they stand for. It seems the fines were perfectly justified and I see no problem with that.
That said, pretending there is not a deliberate "culture war" around the existence of trans people in the UK is either dishonest or ignorant. UK politics, politicians and media have been extremely hostile towards trans people in recent years even relative to the general attitude of the general population in the UK. The level of artificial moral panic surrounding trans people in UK politics and media is surprising even by American standards. There are a number of astroturfed anti-trans groups present in English-speaking media but the most effective ones are all UK-centric.
The fines, however, seem to be orthogonal to that.
A fine for this seems reasonable. Data on sexuality and medical history is protected beyond the normal level for personal data.
£21,000
> At 14: 22 on 6 September 2019 a member of staff in the - used Microsoft Outlook to generate an email communication which was initially sent to a total of 1,781 GIC patients. The email was sent in two batches comprising 912 and 869 email addresses respectively. In both batches the email addresses were copied from the output report and entered into the "To" field instead of the "Blind carbon copy" ("Bee") field. The recipients of each email could therefore see the email addresses of the other recipients of that email. Four of the emails were returned as undeliverable and so potentially 1,777 emails were delivered and opened
£92,000
I mean, they did accidentally dox their clients which is in scope for GDPR enforcement, and they are the 2nd and 3rd lowest fines (likely due to a low level of intentionality and resources), with the only lower fine going to a HIV charity.
Honestly this seems fine.
They're serious privacy violations because of the nature of the data that was exposed. We're also only talking about two organizations, both of which did have legitimate privacy violation incidents.
You're drawing conclusions based on statistically meaningless sample sizes.