Europe gets hit by record number of privacy complaints

LONDON- From an airline emailing a couple’s travel plans to another customer to a car dealership sending a customer’s bank details to a restaurant, a record number of people filed privacy complaints with Europe’s leading data authority last year. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission said on Thursday it received almost 2,900 complaints about the handling of personal data since a landmark Europe-wide privacy law was adopted last May – 8 percent more than in all of 2017.
The surge signalled growing concern across the continent about how people’s data is used, according to the Irish commissioner Helen Dixon, the lead regulator on the European Union’s (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).”The rise … demonstrates a new level of mobilisation to action on the part of individuals to tackle what they see as misuse or failure to adequately explain what is being done with their data,” she said in a statement.