Record number of data complaints made to ICO

• 15 July 2014
 
• From the sectionTechnology

Nuisance calls were once again a major driver of complaints, the ICO said

The UK's information commissioner has called for better funding for the country's data regulator amid a record number of cases.

Ahead of the release of the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) annual report, Christopher Graham said the body needed "stronger powers".

In the past year, the ICO issued £1.97m in penalties to companies found to breach data protection rules.

The report highlighted a high number of incidents involving local government.

"In particular, the disclosure of personal data in error," the report read.

In one example, a probation officer pleaded guilty to revealing the new address of a domestic violence victim to the alleged perpetrator. The officer was fined £150, and had to pay £280 in costs.

The ICO said it resolved 15,492 data protection complaints in the last financial year - a 10% rise on the previous 12 months. The number of calls to its advice helpline rose by more than 15%.

The ICO secured 12 criminal convictions and two cautions for the unlawful obtaining or disclosing of personal data.

Media captionInformation commissioner Christopher Graham: "More powers needed"

In another incident, the ICO intervened when Staffordshire Police ran a Twitter campaign naming people charged with drink driving.

"Whilst releasing some details of people charged with criminal offences is acceptable," the ICO ruled, "using a hashtag '#drinkdrivers' is potentially misleading as it implies guilt."

One data security expert said that the ICO had a strong argument for deserving more funds.

"While penalties totalling £1,97m were issued, the ICO only collected £872,000, thanks to a combination of early payment reductions, appeals and impairments," said Chris McIntosh, chief executive of ViaSat UK.

"This is a situation that clearly favours those organisations with the resources to either reduce penalties through early payment or mount a challenge against a judgement.

"Yet with increased funding and powers, the ICO could not only make sure that penalties, financial or otherwise, matched the severity of an offence. It could make its investigations even more thorough: reducing the chances of appeals and making sure that its eventual judgement was both fair and final."

'Ever-growing'

At the launch of the report on Tuesday, Mr Graham said: "Facebook, [NHS] care data, Google: it is clear that organisations' use of data is getting ever more complicated. People need to know someone is watching over their information.

"Independence means someone who's got the resources to take on this ever-growing number of cases. The last 12 months have been a record year - more complaints resolved than ever, more enforcement action taken and more advice given through our helpline.

"And it also means having the powers to act on the more serious complaints. A strong regulator is needed if a data breach affects millions of people.

The ICO reopened its investigation after a US probe uncovered more detail about the data captured

"To do our job properly, to represent people properly, we need stronger powers, more sustainable funding and a clearer guarantee of independence."

The ICO in the past has been criticised for both being too lenient, and not thorough enough, when investigating companies.

The ICO was described as "sadly lacking" by privacy campaigners when it dropped a 2010 investigation into Google's scooping up of personal information from wi-fi networks when taking pictures for its Street View product.

The ICO dropped its investigation after receiving reassurances from Google - only to re-open it in 2012 after US regulators found wrongdoing on Google's part.

In that year's annual report, it admitted it had not issued a single fine to any firm. However, new powers granted in January 2012 made it easier for the ICO to fine large amounts.

In this year's report, the highest number of complaints relate to nuisance calls. Over the 12 months, 161,720 complaints were made - 46% of which related to automated calls.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28301440

21/05 Backing Her Man With Impressive Resources

THE SATURDAY PROFILE

By STEVEN ERLANGER and MAÏA DE LA BAUME

Published: May 21, 2011

PARIS — She was much more famous than her husband, and much wealthier, too.

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Seth Wenig/Associated Press

Anne Sinclair is the driving force for Dominique Strauss-Kahn's political ambitions.

Related

• Strauss-Kahn Is Released From Jail (May 21, 2011)

• I.M.F. Seeks New Chief by June 30 (May 21, 2011)

• Sexual Affronts a Known Hotel Hazard (May 21, 2011)

• City Room: Strauss-Kahn Reporter Becomes Part of the Report (May 20, 2011)

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Now she joins the unhappy club of wives standing by their man in the face of a crescendo of tales of sexual betrayal, spurred in her case by extraordinary and tawdry criminal charges of attempted rape of a hotel maid.

When Anne Sinclair marriedDominique Strauss-Kahn in November 1991, she was a famous television journalist, her brown hair and steely blue eyes a fixture on the most popular interview show in the country, called “7/7.” She did over 500 interviews, including of presidents like François Mitterrand, Mikhail Gorbachev and Bill Clinton, as well as Hillary Rodham Clinton as first lady, and stars like Yves Montand and even Madonna. The show attracted as many as 12 million viewers every Sunday.

The 1991 marriage was a love match — Mr. Strauss-Kahn had been married twice before and had four children, and she had been married once and had two children of her own. The New York-born child of a family who fled to America to escape the Nazis, and of a father who had the code-name “Sinclair” in the French Resistance, she insisted on a Jewish ceremony after the legal exchange of vows in a Paris city hall.

And as a measure of her beauty and fame, she was married in a room with a bust of Marianne — the symbol of freedom and republican pride in France — that was modeled on her. Her face was not only on most French televisions, but in every city hall.

The two met, predictably, on a television set in 1989. Michel Taubmann, who wrote a recent biography of Mr. Strauss-Kahn timed for a possible presidential campaign, said: “She was subjugated by his intelligence and charm.”

She quit her show after 13 years to avoid a conflict of interest when her husband became finance minister in 1997. She herself became deputy director of channel TF1 and later, director general of its Internet arm. “When you spend 13 years interviewing politicians,” she said then, “you aren’t fascinated by power anymore.”

Still, she was the driving force behind Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s political ambitions, and her wealth, inherited from her grandfather, the art dealer Paul Rosenberg, enabled the couple to live lavishly and independently, with two extraordinary apartments in Paris, a $4 million house in Georgetown and a riad in Marrakesh.

She also helped finance a group of political advisers, press aides and Internet sites that were preparing the ground for what was soon supposed to be a triumphant return to France for Mr. Strauss-Kahn, to begin a race for the presidency many thought he would win.

“She always wanted to prove that, 75 years after Léon Blum, the French were capable of electing a Jew,” a friend told Le Monde. “In her eyes, that would be a formidable revenge on history.”

But her close friend of many years, Alain Duhamel, said in an interview that “she feared the campaign a lot — she knew it would be a great sacrifice in her way of life.” She and her husband considered their religion, he said, “a practical question for the campaign,” not some great cause.

Repeated efforts to contact Ms. Sinclair, through her friends and spokeswoman, both here and in New York, where she flew to see her husband, were unsuccessful.

THE same age as her husband, 62, she was born Anne-Élise Schwartz. Her father, Joseph-Robert Schwartz, legally took the name Sinclair a year later, in 1949; her mother, Micheline Nanette Rosenberg, was painted by Picasso, who called her “Michou.” From Mr. Rosenberg, one of Picasso’s early champions, the family inherited part of a collection of paintings worth many millions of dollars. Just one Matisse, “L’Odalisque, Harmonie Bleue,” was sold in 2007 at Christie’s for $33.6 million.

Ms. Sinclair is on the board of the Picasso Museum in Paris and is writing a book about her grandfather and his life. She graduated from the Institute for Political Studies in Paris and in law from the University of Paris, beginning her career as a radio journalist for Europe 1.

Elie Wiesel was a close friend of Ms. Sinclair and her first husband, the Hungarian-born journalist Ivan Levaï, whose mother brought him to France as a child and was then deported, killed by the Nazis. Mr. Levaï, who was hidden in the French countryside, once called her “too beautiful for me.” The couple’s second son, Elie, is named after Mr. Wiesel.

“She was charming, intelligent, famous in the best sense of the word,” Mr. Wiesel said. “She was a combination of Charlie Rose and Barbara Walters, very well read, very well prepared.”

But there is no way to prepare for the kind of purgatory Ms. Sinclair has entered since her husband’s arrest a week ago on charges of attempted rape. She was in Paris awaiting the birth of her first grandchild when, according to Paris Match, she got a call from her husband about 11 p.m., or 5 p.m. in New York, just after the police pulled him off an Air France plane about to leave the gate.

Related

• Strauss-Kahn Is Released From Jail (May 21, 2011)

• I.M.F. Seeks New Chief by June 30 (May 21, 2011)

• Sexual Affronts a Known Hotel Hazard (May 21, 2011)

• City Room: Strauss-Kahn Reporter Becomes Part of the Report (May 20, 2011)

Readers' Comments

Share your thoughts.

• Post a Comment »
• Read All Comments (75) »

Her face turned pale. He reportedly told her there was “a serious problem.”

On Sunday she issued a statement unreservedly backing her husband and saying that she did not believe the charges against him, and then flew to Manhattan, where she has undertaken to pay Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s $1 million bail and the other costs associated with it — including an apartment, an electronic bracelet and armed guards provided by a company authorized by the court.

“I don’t believe for a single second the accusations of sexual assault by my husband,” she said. “I am certain his innocence will be proven.”

BUT she is already learning the hard price of intense media attention. Having taken two apartments in a building where rents can run to $14,000 a month, she was told that her husband was not welcome there. For now, he is staying in quarters provided by the company that is in charge of his security.

There is no doubt that Ms. Sinclair was aware of her husband’s skirt-chasing, but in public, at least, seemed not to care. Asked in 2006 by L’Express if she suffered from his reputation as a womanizer, she said: “No! I’m even proud of it. It’s important to seduce, for a politician. As long as he is still attracted to me, and I to him, it is sufficient.”

Mr. Duhamel said that Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s behavior was talked about among her friends, but not with her. “This is something she didn’t want to hear,” he said. “Her choice has always been that of passionate solidarity with him.”

The largely unexamined history of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s relationships was highlighted in 2008, when he was investigated by the International Monetary Fund for abuse of power when he had an affair with a married Hungarian economist, Piroska Nagy. The bank concluded that the affair was consensual and rebuked him, but he kept his job. He hired a public-relations firm and issued a statement regretting the affair and apologizing to Ms. Sinclair.

She then wrote on her blog — “Two or three things seen from America” — that “everyone knows that those things happen in couples’ lives; this one-night adventure is behind us.”

In his letter of resignation from the I.M.F., written from jail, Mr. Strauss-Kahn said, “I think at this time first of my wife — whom I love more than anything — of my children, of my family, of my friends.”

Mr. Wiesel expressed sadness for Ms. Sinclair. “There is a Talmudic saying, ‘No one is the owner of his instincts,’ ” he said. “But controlling them, that is civilization.”

On April 30, Ms. Sinclair wrote about the wedding of Prince William. “I can understand those who didn’t miss a crumb. As if, quite simply, we were like children who, before going to sleep, want a tale, a story with a princess and a dream, because real life catches up with you soon enough. ...”

17/04 Diễn viên Nicolas Cage bị bắt vì bạo hành vợ

Chủ Nhật, 17/04/2011, 10:06 (GMT+7)

TTO - Nam diễn viên nổi tiếng từng đoạt giải Oscar Nicolas Cage đã bị bắt tại New Orleans (Mỹ) sau khi “cố tình hành hung” vợ ở ngoại ô French Quater.

>> Những bộ phim ấn tượng của Nicolas Cage

Nicolas Cage lúc bị bắt - Ảnh: AP

Xem trailer phim Faceoff - Nguồn: Youtube

Phát ngôn viên cảnh sát New Orleans gửi thông báo rằng ngôi sao 47 tuổi đã bị bị bắt giam lúc 11g30 đêm thứ sáu (15-4, giờ địa phương).

Cage bị cáo buộc liên quan đến hàng loạt các vụ bạo lực như hành hung vợ, quấy rối trật tự và say xỉn nơi công cộng.

Cage đã đóng tiền phạt 11.000 USD để được tại ngoại. Lệnh hầu tòa của Cage đã được ấn định vào ngày 31-5.

Theo thông báo của cảnh sát, người ta bắt gặp Cage đang cãi nhau với vợ - Alice Kim - trên đường phố French Quarter.

"Cage và vợ đang đứng trước một khu nhà mà ông ấy khăng khăng là nơi họ đã mướn. Bà vợ không đồng tình thì Cage liền vồ lấy cô ấy và đẩy đến trước căn nhà" - CNN dẫn lời cảnh sát.

Sau đó, Cage bắt đầu đập phá một số xe hơi xung quanh trước khi lên một chiếc taxi.

Lúc đó, các nhân chứng đã ra hiệu cho một xe cảnh sát đang trên đường tuần tra. Cảnh sát ngay lập tức bám theo chiếc taxi chở hai vợ chồng và nhanh chóng nhận ra Cage xỉn nặng đã ra lệnh cho ông phải ra khỏi xe. Điều này khiến Cage bực mình và bắt đầu la hét. Cảnh sát sau đó đã đưa Cage đến nhà giam trung tâm.

Cô vợ Alice Kim không có dấu hiệu thương tích. Cô là người vợ thứ ba của Cage, họ có một con chung. Những người vợ trước của Cage là Patricia Arquette và Lisa Marie Presley - cháu gái của cố ca sĩ Elvis Presley.

Nicolas Cage là cháu trai của đạo diễn Francis Ford Coppola. Cage nổi tiếng qua các vai diễn trong những bộ phim như Face/off (tạm dịch: Lật mặt), Angels City (Thành phố thiên thần) và National Treasure (Kho báu quốc gia). Ông đã hai lần được đề cử Oscar và đoạt tượng vàng vào năm 1995 qua bộ phim Leaving Las Vegas (Rời khỏi Las Vegas).

CẢNH TOÀN (Theo CNN)