Figures obtained by Which? suggest that the UK’s biggest banks are breaching data protection rules with alarming regularity, according to the consumer testers.
There were 515 complaints lodged with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) about data protection breaches by eight of Britain’s biggest banks and building societies between August 2009 and August 2010 where the ICO thought it was likely they had broken the rules set out by the Data Protection Act 1998.
Which? used Freedom of Information Act requests to the ICO to find out how many data protection breaches banks and building societies have made.
Barclays was the bank with the most breaches with 116 complaints, followed by Lloyds TSB with 114 and Santander with 103. See the table below for how other banks and building societies performed.
Over half of all complaints arose from firms failing to provide customers with copies of the data held about them properly. Other potential breaches included banks holding inaccurate data about customers, failing to follow security measures and the disclosure of data to third parties.
For a guide to find out more about rights under the Data Protection Act –
http://www.which.co.uk/money/bank-accounts/guides/how-to-bank-online-safely/
Steve Brunswick, Strategy Manager, Thales e-Security commented.
"The press release out this morning from Which? linking complaints figures with data breaches is quite misleading. For example, the statement says that Barclays was ‘the bank with the most data breaches,’ but from the figures we can see that they just received more complaints relating to breaches, which is not the same thing at all. Also, roughly speaking, the biggest banks received the most complaints. Again, no surprise there, they have more customers.
"Not only are complaints about breaches very different to actual breaches, but over half of those complaints were about firms ‘failing to properly provide customers with copies of the data held about them.’ This is not a data breach at all.
"Whilst these findings are interesting, the figures don’t tell us anything about the state of data protection in the industry. Banks take the protection of their customers’ sensitive information very seriously and constantly evaluate their data security defences and procedures in order to protect themselves against the possibility of data breaches."
