The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has issued a formal reprimand and £7,500 monetary penalty to the Central Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in London after the charity reported a personal data breach in which 264 emails were sent to addresses using the CC facility instead of BCC, revealing the identities of 166 individuals on an HIV support programme. The fine was reduced from £300,000 in line with the ICO's public sector approach to enforcement.
In a statement, Information Commissioner John Edwards said: "People living with HIV are being failed across the board when it comes to their privacy and urgent improvements are needed across the UK. We have seen repeated basic failures to keep their personal information safe - mistakes that are clear and easy to avoid."
"The ICO takes each one of these data breaches very seriously and recognises the detrimental impact they can have on the lives of those affected. We are making sure that the improvements we all want to see, such as better training, prompt reporting of personal information breaches and ending the use of BCC for sensitive communications, are being implemented as swiftly as possible."
Commenting on the action taken, data protection specialist Jon Baines posted details of an interesting exchange with the ICO.
The full extract reads:
"The press release also says that the fine was reduced from an initially recommended £300,000, “in line with the ICO’s public sector approach”. When I queried the rather obvious point that a charity is not a public authority, an ICO spokesman initially told me that “as Central YMCA is a charity that does a lot of good work, they engaged with us in good faith after the incident happened, recognised their mistake immediately and have made amends to their processing activities and they paid the fine in full straight away, we applied the spirit of the public sector approach to them even though they’re not strictly a public sector body”.
This led to a further follow-up query from me because as a matter of logic and timing, how could the fact that a controller “paid the fine in full straight away” be a mitigating factor in reducing the amount of the fine to be paid? The further response was “The point was that they engaged fully and subsequently paid the fine in full, thus confirming our position that they were engaging and taking the breach seriously. The calculation comes before the payment which has no bearing on the assessed amount.”
I’m not quite sure what to make of this. Can any controller which “does a lot of good work”, engages with the ICO in good faith and remedies processing activities also benefit from a 3900% decrease in fine from an originally-recommended sum? What does “a lot of good work” mean? Is it something only charities do? What about private companies with a strong ESG ethos, or who make significant charitable contributions?"
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