Precedent corpus / ICO (United Kingdom)

Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland

ICO (United Kingdom) case psni-2024-10, decided 2024-10-04. EUR 870,000.

What the regulator decided

A spreadsheet released as part of a freedom-of-information response contained a hidden tab disclosing the surnames, initials, ranks and roles of all 9,483 PSNI officers and staff to the public internet; the controller had not implemented appropriate technical and organisational measures to identify the hidden data before release, breaching Articles 5(1)(f), 32(1) and 32(2) UK GDPR.

Primary source

Regulator-owned URL. Quote this in legal briefs and academic citations.

https://ico.org.uk/media2/migrated/4031177/psni-penalty-notice.pdf

Archived snapshot

Wayback Machine snapshot of the primary source. Use this when the regulator URL might be refactored or expire.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260105045413/https://ico.org.uk/media2/migrated/4031177/psni-penalty-notice.pdf

ConsentMark interpretation

Operator-readable note on how this case shapes the ConsentMark scanner narrative. Not a legal opinion; cites the primary source.

EUR amount approximate (round-trip from GBP 750k at the enforcement-date FX rate). The ICO public-sector approach reduced the indicative fine from GBP 5.6M to GBP 750k. Cite when the scanner narrative covers an inadvertent-disclosure-via-publication pattern - the hidden-tab issue is the data-protection equivalent of a spreadsheet-row-level-access misconfiguration.

Verification trail

Verified by
donal
Verified at
2026-05-27
Review due
2026-11-27
Cite this case

Pick the format that matches where you are pasting. The methodology version is preserved in every variant so the citation stays verifiable after future methodology changes.

BibTeX
@misc{consentmark-precedent-ico-psni-2024-10,
  author       = {{ConsentMark}},
  year         = {2024},
  title        = {ICO (United Kingdom) psni-2024-10 - Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland},
  howpublished = {\url{https://www.consentmark.com/precedent/ico-psni-2024-10}},
  note         = {ConsentMark methodology v1.3}
}
APA
ConsentMark. (2024, October 4). ICO (United Kingdom) psni-2024-10 - Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Methodology v1.3. https://www.consentmark.com/precedent/ico-psni-2024-10
Markdown
[ICO (United Kingdom) psni-2024-10 - Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland - ConsentMark](https://www.consentmark.com/precedent/ico-psni-2024-10)
Plain text
ICO (United Kingdom) psni-2024-10 - Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland - ConsentMark, 2024-10-04, methodology v1.3, https://www.consentmark.com/precedent/ico-psni-2024-10