ICO January Updates for 2014

The ICO has had a busy January with some key updates to note for the start of 2014.

The ICO has produced a series of quarterly reports:

Spam text messages The main three topics for the subject of unsolicited marketing text messages were found to be debt management, payday loans and payment protection insurance. Enforcement activity for 2014 will focus on culprits in breach of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) 2003. The ICO has lobbied the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to lower the threshold to trigger enforcement by monetary penalty fines for violation of PECR, submitting the case that the trigger of demonstrating substantial damage or distress is too high, with too many organisations sending unsolicited marketing texts slipping through the grasp of the ICO's enforcement powers. Marketing calls The top three subjects of live sales calls covered payment protection insurance, accident claims and energy. The level of complaints about cold calls is at its lowest level since October 2012, totalling 4,996 in December 2014. The ICO correlates the decline in complaints as a direct result of fines issued in 2013, such as that against DM Design Bedrooms Ltd of £90,000 for making 2000 unsolicited marketing calls in breach of PECR. Cookies The ICO received 53 complaints during the period of October-December 2013 about cookies via the ICO website. The ICO is focusing enforcement on the most visited UK websites, which have taken no steps to raise awareness about cookies or sought to gain user consent. The ICO has now written to a total of 265 organisations about compliance with cookie rules. The ICO has experienced mixed fortunes with enforcement action. On January 24, the ICO successfully sentenced six investigators of ICU Investigations Ltd for conspiring to unlawfully obtain personal data about its clients, finding the two managers of the company guilty of a criminal offence under section 55 of the Data Protection Act 1998, and fined the investigators a total of £37,107. Furthermore, back in December 2013, the ICO issued a fine of £175,000 against payday loan company First Financial UK for sending millions of...

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