Your name, your email address, your home address, your bank details, your credit or debit card details. You probably cannot count the number of times that you have been asked to share these important pieces of personal data with a company or organisation in the past weeks or months. As more and more of us report sharing an ever increasing volume of our personal information online, is enough being done to keep it safe?
The more information we share, the greater the risk there is of us falling victim to a data breach. While in some cases you may just need to update all your passwords, the loss of more important, personal data could have serious consequences, including leaving you at greater risk of being subject to fraud. Over the past year, we have seen reports of high-profile hacks of numerous organisations – Yahoo, Uber and Equifax to name just three.
More recently we have heard about the serious security flaw in Intel’s computer processors that could leave millions of people around the globe at risk of a data breach. It’s not surprising that in a recent study we found that nearly three-quarters (73%) of people were concerned that the information they had shared online could be at risk of a leak.
Despite regular news about such massive hacks, there is still no system in place for consumers affected by a data breach to seek collective redress. Such a mechanism would allow for independent bodies to represent classes comprised of all consumers negatively impacted by a data breach, which hadn’t been properly handled by the organisation that held that data, whether or not the consumers were aware that they had been affected. This would streamline the process, implementing a time- and cost-efficient way to deliver effective justice for victims.
At present, if a company does not offer you redress directly, it is only available through a lengthy and potentially expensive route that an individual would need to take via the courts. In addition, we recently found that as many as one in five people don’t know how to claim redress following a data breach.
The data protection bill is currently being debated in the House of Lords, which gives the government a unique opportunity to amend it to offer greater protection to consumers. In its current form it is inadequate for holding organisations to account when there is a breach of data laws, since it relies on individuals knowing they are affected, knowing their rights and proactively starting a claim or appointing a representative.
It must be amended so that independent organisations acting in the public interest can help groups of affected consumers to get redress. The clock is ticking. The House of Lords must use this opportunity to support consumers’ ability to hold companies to account or risk shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.