In September 2024, the Irish Data Protection Commission fined Meta Ireland 91 million euros after passwords of social media users were stored in 'plaintext' on Meta's internal systems rather than with cryptographic protection or encryption. In May 2023, the EU fined Meta 1.2 billion euros for violating laws on digital privacy and putting the data of EU citizens at risk through Facebook's EU-U.S. data transfers. European privacy legislation is seen as being far stricter than American privacy law, and the sending of EU citizens’ data to the United States resulted in the record breaking penalty being issued to the tech giant. In January 2023, after it was discovered that Meta Platforms had improperly required that users of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp accept personalized adverts to use the platforms, the company was issued a 390 million euro fine by the European Commission. EU regulators claim that the social media giant broke the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by including the demand in its terms of service. In addition, Meta was fined 405 million euros by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) in September 2022 for violating Instagram's children's privacy settings. In November 2022, the DPC fined Meta a further 265 million euros for failing to protect their users from data scraping. GDPR violations in 2022 Social media sites and companies are not the only types of online services upon which users' data can potentially be compromised. In 2022, the online service with the biggest fine for violating GDPR was e-commerce and digital powerhouse Amazon, which was issued a 746 million euro fine. Furthermore, in December 2021, Google was penalized 90 million euros for GDPR violations. What are the most common GDPR violations? Since GDPR went into effect in May 2018, fines have been imposed for a variety of reasons. As of June 2022, companies' non-compliance with general data processing principles accounted for the largest share of fines, resulting in over 845 million euros worth of penalties. Insufficient legal basis for data processing was the second most common violation, amounting to 447 million euros in fines.

A dataset containing all requests under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and Environmental Information Regulations 2004 recorded by the council in the 2016/17 financial year.

This dataset is updated on a monthly basis, one month in arrears.

Full requests and responses can be found on out Disclosure Log.

More information about the Act and Regulations can be found on our website.

Energy Performance Data for Non-domestic Buildings:This dataset presents data from every valid non-domestic EPC assessment held by the Scottish EPC Register (SEPCR) from commencement of central lodgement of the current EPC format to the SEPCR in October 2014 to September 2024. The data was extracted from the register on 25 October 2024.The data is published as a single file. Historic records (where a newer assessment of a building is lodged) and records lodged but subsequently marked ‘not for issue’ (usually due to an error in lodged data) are not reported. The data published in this extract is made available as Environmental Information for data analysis and to enable research into energy efficiency issues. The data must not be relied upon to verify if a valid EPC exists for a building, nor as the basis for the provision of energy improvement advice for a building. To check for compliance with regulatory requirements, a search for a valid EPC for a building should be undertaken at the Scottish Energy Performance Certificate Register. Please note that this data is not personal data in its published form. Persons accessing this dataset should be aware that if processing falls within the scope of the United Kingdom General Data Protection Regulation, or The Data Protection Act 2018, they will become a data controller and must comply with the data protection legislation. In line with the Scottish Government's Open Data Strategy, this data is published in a three-star format (data which is made available online, in an open and machine-readable format – see below for copyright information).

This survey reports a range of experiences from 641 online sex workers selling sexual services via digital technologies during 2016/2017. The survey covers a range of topics including experiences at work, job satisfaction, types of online work, crimes experienced in the working context, relationships with the police and demographics of individuals doing online sex work. The BtG study found that the internet was of significant importance to sex workers indifferent aspects of their work, with 65.3% (n=419) agreeing or strongly agreeing that they would not do sex work if it was not for the internet. This related particularly to those working exclusively in webcam/phone sex work, where 90.5% (n=67) tended to or strongly agreed with this statement, but also to more than two-thirds (67.5%; n=131) of independent sex workers/escorts who did not work in any other sex industry sector. The responses to the survey of sex workers showed the internet played a large part in improving working practices.

As we are aware from our prior research that many sex workers use more than one online platform and/or networking site, we asked in our promotional material that people complete the survey only once. We also asked when they arrived at the survey: where they accessed the link from on this occasion; which other online platforms they used; and whether they thought they had already completed the survey. This enabled us to reduce the number of potential duplicate entries, but also to obtain some idea of the overlap between different advertising and networking sites. Note: as the software we used does not collect IP addresses or any other identifying data, we were not able as in some surveys to recognise duplicate entries through this means.

The survey was designed using Bristol Online Surveys (BOS), a UK-based online survey tool aimed at academic, educational and public sector communities. BOS is compliant with all UK data protection laws.

As some of the websites promoting the survey are not UK-based and have a wider reach than the UK, we specified in our invitation to participate that the survey was for sex workers living in and/or working in the UK. In order to verify whether respondents not based in the UK worked in the UK, we also asked about geographical place of work as well as domicile. Despite specifying the target group for the survey, the online questionnaire was completed by a small number of sex workers who neither lived in nor worked in the UK and these were removed from the data prior to analysis.

The survey commenced on 7th November 2016. It was initially advertised on six websites, including a major advertising site for escorts and webcammers with more than 25,000 profiles for female, male and transgender escorts, as well as being promoted through Twitter, facebook and emails to a small number of contacts. By the following week, it had been advertised on nine sites, including the project’s own website, with continuing promotion also on social media. At this stage the invitation to take part in the survey had not appeared on any major sites used by male sex workers and reminders were sent out to the two sites which had agreed to promote the research. By the end of 2016, the survey had been promoted on 15 advertising websites, Beyond the Gaze’s own website, on social media (Twitter and facebook), through sex work projects’ contacts and by snowballing methods. The survey closed on 23rd January 2017, with 652 completed responses and 6 partial responses, which were removed prior to analysis. A further 11 respondents neither lived nor worked in the UK and these were also removed from the dataset, leaving a final total of 641 respondents living and/or working in the UK.

Technology, particularly digital communication, has had a profound impact on how we organise our lives, conduct our relationships and the transactions of commerce and retail. The sex industry has followed this trend, with the online sex markets expanding and diversifying, changing the shape of how sex is bought and sold. Yet no regulation and very little policing focuses on the Internet-based sex markets. Our overarching question is: How has the Internet shaped the 21st Century adult commercial sex industry in the UK and what is the role of regulation? Our research focuses on the gaps in knowledge, in terms of how the market is structured, how it functions and how it is currently regulated. We are concerned with those individuals who work legally in their own homes, or as escorts doing outcalls to hotels and clients' homes, all away from the ordinary gaze of policing. There has been no attention to the interactions between technology and types of commercial sex such as webcam sex; performing live sex acts and chat; sexual story telling; and how niche markets have developed both allowing sex workers to innovate as well as opening up working opportunities. Therefore our overall inquiry seeks to explain how regulation interacts with the Internet...