ICO: You call that a sentence? Courts need power to hit data thieves harder Blighty's data watchdog has moaned that the UK's courts needs greater powers to impose penalties on data thieves after a woman was slapped with a £1,000 for flogging 28,000 customer records for £5,000. Sindy Nagra, 42, from Hayes, was issued the fine by Isleworth Crown Court on Friday. She was an admin assistant at a car …
The court seems to have found that she hasn't got any money so suing her for more is unlikely to be much more than an administrative exercise which wastes the courts time... and costs the tax payer.
Better to give her a 1000 pound fine which if she can realistically pay it and then perhaps give her community service for six months.
What's that, she has no money to pay the fine... but you want to increase it?
Punishment should fit the crime: Make her 'work', the job being signing up with her personal details to all the shite websites that collect this info for "marketing" purposes, 50 a day for a month or two should be about right, might teach her some respect for data privacy.
suspended prison sentence.......there are lots of options
Come off it! Anybody willing to break the law in the first place will not regard a suspended sentence as a punishment, they'll go home and celebrate.
The only reason we have suspended sentences in the first place is because there are too few prison places for the number of offenders who might otherwise receive a custodial sentence, not because it is any form of valid punishment (or incentive to reform).
>What's that, she has no money to pay the fine... but you want to increase it?
M'lud my clients have spent all the money they robbed from the bank and are now unemployed (until the Croyden post-office job comes up) and so feel that a fine of 10% of the proceeds would be appropriate.
...does this include Google and Microsoft et al?
Thought not. Anyway...
All this is fun and games till it's your medical records being leaked, or worse, the fact that you are on a list of 'grasses'. Already happened with the latter iirc. But it's the odd 'data leak' here or there that specifically targets individuals who grass on specific criminals, I would worry about, just for one off the cuff example. This is why I wouldn't waste my time reporting crime to the police, I don't trust that that very information wouldn't get back into the hands of the person I was reporting.
Sad times we live in.
Trust no one, keep your head down, and pray that when this stuff does get leaked, you are more a part of the haystack, rather than the needle.
I consider the fact my housing association can view my medical records legally, to be a form of 'data theft', 'data rape' in fact.
Anyone with any illusions that this is not going to happen to them at some point soon is living in cloud cuckoo land. 2015 - the year the internet and the dream died. Accept it - you are gonna get data raped.
As for this miscreant in this particular story, lynching might be a bit of an over reaction, but 10 years in the nick I'd be happy with. She got away with it really. £5000 grand for the data theft and a £1000 fine. Doesn't say whether she had the money confiscated or not.
I really don't think people appreciate the gravity of the situation we are now in, and what a pivotal momental year it was that just passed. We are now officially living in interesting times. They should have set a precedent with this scumbag, but of course, they don't want to make a rod for their own back...
The ICO would do better asking themselves whey they fail to take appropriate action so frequently rather than complain about others.
Just look at what's happened with Safe Harbour up til now: they're far more intent on legitimising the activities of the companies exporting our data rather than actually ENFORCING THE LAW (apparently expecting them to do their job is a 'knee-jerk reaction').
To put this into context, you can be sentenced for the fifth ABH in a string of seventy assault convictions and still get away with a £70 fine.
Much as I dislike data thieves, including MS and Google, I'd much rather the prison places went on thugs.
Talking of data loss and thugs, anyone else remember the original reason Borris Johnson got invited onto Have I Got News for You all those years ago.
There are provisions in the UK legal system for the confiscation of the proceeds of crime, independently of any fine. Perhaps this is the correct course for deterring future offences. As it stands now, this individual has a £4,000 profit balance (although no job, and a criminal record...)
Edit: Wired-gov.net reports that the chap she sold the data to also got a fine of £1000.
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