Earlier this year, I wrote about how I considered the ICO's meagre £250,000 fine handed out to Sony for losing control of its servers and risking the theft of every man, woman and child's data on there as "a slap on the wrist".
Further reading
Google handed Wikileaks volunteers' Gmail accounts to NSA, targets reveal No fine for Google Street View, but data it still holds must be deleted, rules ICO ICO issues Google with notice over street car data collection
But now, it transpires that not only has the ICO chickened out of fining Google £500,000 for "accidentally" collecting data on members of the public as its Street View cars trundled around the country, it's actually decided not to fine Google at all.
It feels like a pattern is emerging, and that's roughly that the severity of data loss is inversely proportional to the fine meted out. Lose 2,000 NHS patient details on hard drives on eBay, that'll cost you £325,000. Lose 2.2m logins and credit card details off PlayStation network, that's £250,000.
Send a fleet of cars waltzing around a whole country, nicking internet passwords, internet usage history and goodness what else direct from people's homes, and you get off scot free.
This doesn't just make the ICO look toothless. It doesn't even just make the ICO look dangerously, even criminally, incompetent. It makes it look scared, and unwilling to rise to the challenge of standing up to something bigger than itself. And if this country's own regulatory body is too scared to stand up for our privacy on the world stage, that's a massively serious problem for the future of anybody in the UK who values the sanctity of their personal data.
Because let's not forget that this pardon isn't even the first time the ICO has tried to brush the Google Street View issue under the carpet. It closed its initial investigation back in 2012, saying it didn't have the right regulatory powers to fine Google at the time. However, it mysteriously reopened the case after the FCC began an investigation which ended with a $7m settlement earlier this month, as well as a further $25,000 in response to Google apparently attempting to obstruct the investigation.
Google refusing to fully comply with orders apparently wasn't restricted to just the US either, and this is where things get truly pitiful as far as the ICO is concerned, because by all accounts, the web giant failed to destroy the data it had collected on at least one.
