West Midlands Police (WMP) has been reprimanded by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) for repeatedly mixing up the identities of two individuals with the same name and date of birth, resulting in inaccurate personal information being processed.
The series of errors included officers attending the wrong address and visiting the school of the wrong person's child. Despite becoming aware of the issue, the force failed to quickly rectify the error and prevent the inaccurate linking of records from reoccurring.
The ICO also highlighted a lack of data protection training and insufficient efforts to make employees aware of their responsibilities to report any inaccurate personal information.
What is this page?
You are reading a summary article on the Privacy Newsfeed, a free resource for DPOs and other professionals with privacy or data protection responsibilities helping them stay informed of industry news all in one place. The information here is a brief snippet relating to a single piece of original content or several articles about a common topic or thread. The main contributor is listed in the top left-hand corner, just beneath the article title.
The Privacy Newsfeed monitors over 300 global publications, of which more than 5,750 summary articles have been posted to the online archive dating back to the beginning of 2020. A weekly roundup is available by email every Friday.