Shopacheck fined for data loss

Category: Data recovery

11 July, 2012

An organisation has been fined for losing back-up tapes, which could have been vital in the event of data loss.

Doorstep lender Shopacheck has been fined £150,000 by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) for failing to notice the data was missing from the secure IT room for around a month.

The tapes contained the personal details of some 510,000 customers as well as the bank account details and CVs for 20,000 people who had worked at the firm between 2002 and 2010.

Welcome Financial Services, the parent company of Shopacheck, has now taken steps to prevent a similar data loss in the future.

"We hope these penalties send a clear message to both the public and private sectors that they cannot afford to fail when it comes to handling people's data correctly," information commissioner Christopher Graham said.

Not only could data loss on this scale cause reputational damage, but the loss of back-up tapes could make data recovery following a disaster much more difficult.

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Published by Paulie Phillips