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The Information Commissioner’s Office is getting tougher over data security with the imposition of fines of up to half a million pounds for serious breaches, something which could prove costly for careless marketeers.

“The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) will be able to order organisations to pay up to £500,000 as a penalty for serious breaches of the Data Protection Act,” said an ICO statement. “The ICO has produced statutory guidance about how it proposes to use this new power, which has been approved by the Secretary of State for Justice, and has been laid before Parliament this week.”

The size of the fine will be determined after an investigation to assess the gravity of the breach and will also be based on the the size and finances of the organisation at fault, whether the breach was accidental or deliberate, and how much distress the leak of information caused.

“The Information Commissioner will take a pragmatic and proportionate approach to issuing an organisation with a monetary penalty,” the ICO statement said. “Factors will be taken into account including an organisation’s financial resources, sector, size and the severity of the data breach, to ensure that undue financial hardship is not imposed on an organisation.”

“Getting data protection right has never been more important than it is today. As citizens, we are increasingly asked to complete transactions online, with the state, banks and other organisations using huge databases to store our personal details,” said Information Commissioner Christopher Graham. “When things go wrong, a security breach can cause real harm and great distress to thousands of people.”

“These penalties are designed to act as a deterrent and to promote compliance with the Data Protection Act. I remain committed to working with voluntary, public and private bodies to help them stick to the rules and comply with the Act. But I will not hesitate to use these tough new sanctions for the most serious cases where organisations disregard the law.”

The original Act came into force in 1984. Under the most recent Act of 1998, data can only be used for the purposes for which it is collected and cannot be given to others without the consent of the individual. Everybody has the right to see information that is held about them, with the exception of crime-related data. 

The cost of data breaches is already staggeringly high for UK businesses; last year the average breach cost £1.7 million, or £60 for each identity lost. If the ICO’s bite turns out to be as big as its bark, this cost could exceed £2 million; a huge expense at a time when businesses and public sector bodies can ill afford to waste money.
 

As a result, such tools will start to be adopted beyond simply marketing departments and some organisations will start providing budgets to enable the implementation of actionable strategies. Others will even set up separate units in order to exploit them to the full.

According to a report entitled ‘Top Social Computing Predictions for 2010’ recently published by the research firm, the forthcoming year will see enterprises view such tools less as an end in themselves and more as a means to an end.

This means that they will realise that the value of social media tools lies less as simply a means of acquiring lots of followers and more in turning such followers into business assets. Therefore, there will be an increased focus on measuring the performance of such offerings and in understanding their impact.

A growing appreciation that what is said on one platform such as Twitter will be picked up on another, thereby informing consumers’ overall view of the brand, will likewise mean that interest in such tools is no longer confined to just the social or interactive arm of the marketing department. 

Firms will also start work on improving mobile device support and cross-channel integration to ensure that mobile technology can be used to share information and learn about brands as easily as other modes of access.

But as the adoption of social computing activities moves more into the mainstream so will advocates come under increasing pressure to both use them to turn a profit and ensure that the privacy of customer data is safeguarded.

Inadequate customer support facilities for Google’s much-hyped Nexus One smartphone have resulted in the vendor’s online forums being inundated with complaints from customers.

Google is selling its device, which was launched on Tuesday 5 January in the US, directly to end-users, which means that they are turning to the supplier as the first port of call to fix any problems.

But the company is currently only accepting email based customer queries, which it promises to reply to within one or two days. Many clients are saying that such a timeframe is too long, however, particularly if they are facing technical difficulties that require telephone support.

They are also unhappy at being passed from pillar to post if they approach partners Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer HTC, or mobile carrier T-Mobile, for help. Various complaints indicated that T-Mobile often refers users back to either Google or HTC, while HTC transfers people on to T-Mobile.

Other people have complained about poor 3G performance, but said they were told by HTC customer service staff that NexusOne does not support the technology, although the device itself does.

Some long-term T-Mobile customers were likewise disgruntled that they had to pay more for the phone than new customers, while others were told that they were eligible for subsidies when Google’s sales site indicated they were not. Yet more consumers were peeved about the fact that they placed an order but failed to receive confirmation as much as three days later.

Andy Rubin, Google’s vice president of engineering, admitted to Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski in an interview that: “We have to get better at customer service.”

The European version of Nexus One, which is based on the Android open source operating system and will run on Vodafone’s mobile network, is due to follow in the second quarter of this year. An enterprise version is also expected to appear at some unspecified time in the future.

A report, commissioned by the government, suggests firms such as Google, Yahoo and Facebook should pay a new tax on their online ad revenues.

The money could be used to fund legal alternatives for buying books, films and music on the internet.

But critics say the tax would be difficult to implement and Google says it could slow down innovation.

President Nicolas Sarkozy has taken a tough line on the increasing dominance of digital content.

France has just introduced tough new legislation aimed at removing those who persistently download illegal content from the net.

It has also gone head to head with Google over its plans to digitise the world’s books, with a project to set up its own digital library financed by the government to the tune of £700m.

Additionally it is considering a law which would give net users the option to have old data about themselves deleted.

The proposals for a tax on content is still very much in the early stages and there are few details of how it would exactly work.

Patrick Zelnik, who contributed to the report and is also the founder of the French president’s wife’s record label, hopes the idea will be taken on board across the EU.

But Google is among those to have voiced opposition to the plan.

“We don’t think introducing an additional tax on internet advertising is the right way forward as it could slow down innovation,” said Olivier Esper, senior policy manager for Google France.

The better way to support content creation is to find new business models that help consumers find great content and rewards artists and publishers for their work.”

8. The need for information crosses all borders.
Although Google’s headquarters is in California, our mission is to facilitate access to information for the entire world, so we have offices around the globe. To achieve this, we maintain dozens of Internet domains and serve more than half of our results to users living outside the United States. Google search results can be restricted to pages written in more than 35 languages according to a user’s preference. 

9. You can be serious without a suit.
Google’s founders have often stated that the company is not serious about anything but search. They built a company around the idea that work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun. To achieve this, Google’s culture is unlike any in corporate America, and it’s not because of the lava lamps and large rubber balls everywhere, or the fact that the company’s chef used to cook for the Grateful Dead. In the same way Google puts users first when it comes to our online service, Google Inc. puts employees first when it comes to daily life in our Googleplex headquarters. 

10. Great just isn’t good enough.
Always deliver more than expected. Google does not accept being the best as an endpoint, but a starting point. Through innovation and iteration, Google takes something that works well and improves upon it in unexpected ways. Search works well for correctly spelt words, but what about typos? One engineer saw a need and created a spell checker that seems to read a user’s mind. It takes too long to search from a WAP phone? Our wireless group developed Google Number Search to reduce entries from three keystrokes per letter to one. 

* Full-disclosure update: When Google first wrote these “10 things” four years ago, they included the phrase “Google does not do horoscopes, financial advice or chat.” Over time they’ve expanded the view of the range of services they can offer –- web search, for instance, isn’t the only way for people to access or use information -– and products that then seemed unlikely are now key aspects of our portfolio. 

5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.
The world is increasingly mobile and unwilling to be constrained to a fixed location. Whether it’s through their PDAs, their wireless phones or even their cars, people want information to come to them. Google’s innovations in this area include Google Number Search, which reduces the number of keypad strokes required to find data from a web-enabled mobile phone and an on-the-fly translation system that converts pages written in HTML to a format that can be read by phone browsers. 

6. You can make money without doing evil.
Google is a business. The revenue the company generates is derived from offering its search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on Google and on other sites across the web. However, you may have never seen an ad on Google. That’s because Google does not allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they’re relevant to the results page on which they’re shown. So, only certain searches produce sponsored links above or to the right of the results. Google firmly believes that ads can provide useful information if, and only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find.

Google has also proven that advertising can be effective without being flashy. Google does not accept pop-up advertising, which interferes with your ability to see the content you’ve requested. We’ve found that text ads (AdWords) that are relevant to the person reading them draw much higher click-through rates than ads appearing randomly. 

Advertising on Google is always clearly identified as a “Sponsored Link.” It is a core value for Google that there is no compromise on the integrity of our results. We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results. No one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust Google’s objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust.

Thousands of advertisers use our Google AdWords program to promote their products; we believe AdWords is the largest program of its kind. In addition, thousands of web site managers take advantage of our Google AdSense program to deliver ads relevant to the content on their sites, improving their ability to generate revenue and enhancing the experience for their users.