It also pledges to strengthen the powers of the Information Commissioner, "to penalise any public body found guilty of mismanaging data," require privacy impact assessments and parliamentary scrutiny of any proposal involving data collection or sharing.
While that is pocket change to those big businesses that have been guilty of letting data slip, the ICO believes that the reputational damage of a breach can cause a substantial amount of financial harm too.
No wonder privacy watchdogs are now considering whether Scotland Yard was guilty of breaching data protection laws following the revelation that officers examined journalists' mobile phone records that the force had been sent in error.
One recent example is the case of Eric Poehlman, a researcher formerly at the University of Vermont in Burlington found guilty of falsifying data in more than a dozen federal grant applications that landed him nearly $3 million.
Molecular physiologist Kimon Angelides last week ended a long battle against his former employer, Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, which had found him guilty of fabricating data and stripped him of tenure.
That testimony led to a finding that William Fals-Stewart, an expert on addiction, was not guilty of fabricating data, according to a statement released this week by the New York Attorney General.
For example, in November 2016, Russia's communications regulator ordered public access to LinkedIn's website to be blocked to comply with a court ruling that found the social networking firm guilty of violating a data storage law, which stipulates the personal data of Russian users must be stored on the territory of the Russian Federation [12].
Coyne was found guilty of using Labour party data and a call centre used by the party's West Midlands mayoral candidate, Siôn Simon, to contact potential supporters.
He said his greatest concern was the inability by police to prove that other journalists in Scotland were guilty of hacking and data protection breaches, which had happened on "an industrial scale".
