Data breaches by Mermaids exposed in the Times

[truthisarevolutionaryact]

Mermaids has apparently put lots of confidential data online including private emails, personal data and emails demonstrating the pressure they have put on the Tavistock.
Andrew Gilligan article - share token:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/parents-anger-as-child-sex-change-charity-puts-private-emails-online-tl0g5hwcg?shareToken=2f8ddc23419c61360023562a62e74d13

They need an article 9 basis as well as a 6 basis. If not consent what is it?
If ICO opens an investigation into this all these issues will be explored. This is going to be a world of pain for them. Any donations from here on in are paying their legal fees - unless some woke wankers take them on pro bono. Which is quite likely

He can fuck right off with his pompous waffle about complexities and nuance.

Lang, if he's doing it now, it's significant. I'll take it.

Badley Fuckitt is seeming increasingly attractive right now.

That way the grown ups can start to take control of the situation.

Point taken.

Any donations from here on in are paying their legal fees - unless some woke wankers take them on pro bono. Which is quite likely

GDPR is a specialist area in its own right. It will be something that the usual suspects won't necessarily have experience in.

And good luck to them if they do. That'll be hours and hours unpaid. I wouldn't like to take on the ICO... Especially over a breech of this scale. You aren't winning. You haven't a hope of winning.

I think the penny is finally dropping for Maugham.

Even a cheerleader like him can spot that the Mermaids statement completely contradicts Gilligan's article. Even if he does preface it with the "huge respect for the work that they do".

twitter.com/JolyonMaugham/status/1140159023393755136

"That statement (from Mermaids) seems to flatly contradicts the Sunday Times report in a number of respects. I don't like the Sunday Times, at all, but I'd be surprised if they had the bare facts wrong".

So have a think about this Jolyon. Clearly someone is lying, given the flat contradiction that you've noticed. So who's lying and why? And what else are they lying about?

Maybe 9 (2) d, angryllama?

“(d) processing is carried out in the course of its legitimate activities with appropriate safeguards by a foundation, association or any other not-for-profit body with a political, philosophical, religious or trade union aim and on condition that the processing relates solely to the members or to former members of the body or to persons who have regular contact with it in connection with its purposes and that the personal data are not disclosed outside that body without the consent of the data subjects”

But then they’d fail that on the grounds that they’ve disclosed outside the organisation.

At any rate, they need to be able to give an account of why they have chosen that lawful purpose and back it up, which I sorely doubt they can. They’ve got a lot of questions to answer. Sadly, the ICO is swamped, by all accounts so I’m not holding my breath...

I don't think he's being objective so much as too scared/lazy to do any research

I don't have the information to make that assessment - I doubt you do either - and in the circumstances I have to delegate my assessment to those like the Big Lottery Fund who do.

This tweet of jolyon's from this v interesting thread with Helen Joyce and Kathleen stock
twitter.com/Docstockk/status/1140173690379939840?s=19

And let's be clear, of course Maugham is only speaking out now in order to protect himself, given his support of Mermaids in the past.

He is trying to distance himself before the bomb goes off.

However serious this data breach is, and it absolutely is, it pales into insignificance given what else Mermaids is up to. With Maugham's support.

Presumably he knows about the data breach of donors because he was a donor himself and received the email with other donors' details on it?

Does their privacy notice mention the 9 2 d basis Sophocles?
If not, there’s another big problem ...
They’re in the poop aren’t they.

The story has made the front page of the Sunday Times today. At the bottom, one of only 3 articles on the cover so that's pole position in news terms.

Mail on Sunday also has a child-sex-abuse-at-Oxfam story. All of these dodgy characters are running out of safe places to hide thank god.

Why do people not see this? Why is this topic so toxic?

Because people have been taught not to question. It's forbidden, some people have had this drilled into them since primary school or before.

Unprogramming the be nice and shut up response takes a long time.

Nope, there is not a single reference to an article in their whole policy. It’s vague as a vague thing.

www.mermaidsuk.org.uk/privacy-policy-and-cookies.html

Consent is never mentioned, other than rather bizarrely, where they mention that you can withdraw the consent you weren’t asked for though maybe I’m reading it wrong. Special categories aren’t defined. Legitimate interests aren’t defined.

That is one bad, bad data privacy notice.

Why do people not see this? Why is this topic so toxic?

Because it is so outrageous and so horrible it doesn't seem like it could possibly be real.

Running the risk of Godwin, but Hitler was the original "big liar":

"A big lie (Germann: große Lüge) is a propagandaa technique. The expression was coined by Adolf Hitlerr, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampff, about the use of a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truthh* so infamously"."

Please be careful when discussing Mermaids, Susie Green, and so forth.

Experience tells me that if you post the slightest incorrect bit of info/ speculation, they'll report you/ doxx you, or worse.

Why are these charities and organisations Teflon coated? Why are they not scrutinised. Stonewall, Mermaids, Gendered Intelligence doing so much damage and yet people are to blind to see it.

And let's be clear, of course Maugham is only speaking out now in order to protect himself, given his support of Mermaids in the past.

Indeed. Maugham is protecting his reputation over previous comments. But it's the start of a uturn.

He wasn't interested in looking at evidence before. Now all of a sudden when there's evidence of poor governance in an area of safeguarding that isn't ideologically hampered and fits with his own values he has a problem. His 'sacred values' just kicked in to halt his unquestioning wokeness.

He has to start looking at governance full stop in a professional manner. Him saying about nuance and complexity is him switching from his emotional side to his rational one, where he is obliged to follow the evidence.

It's almost hilariously funny to see, if it wasn't over an issue so serious.

For Mermaids to be caught breaching safeguarding on ground which isn't 'their home patch' is an absolute godsend.

And my final piece of geekery for this morning as I have to go out.

Their privacy policy was updated on the 24th of May 2018, which was the day before the GDPR came in to force. What I take from this is that they chucked it together in order to have something in place before the deadline, but they haven’t reviewed or updated it since.

A lot has come out on the interpretation and implementation of the regulation since then, and given the type of data processing that they do (special categories AND children), you’d expect to see a lot more substance, and probably some kind of update in the intervening year.

They also make reference to a form which isn’t there. It’s sloppy. If the public facing material is this poor, what’s happening behind the scenes?

What riles me most is the amount of noise Mermaids make about the children's confidentiality being so crucial - life-and-death crucial - that they really need to discard basic safeguarding procedures for the greater good (eg staff not being able to tell parents that Guide residentials are mixed sex, parents don't have an automatic right to know their child is seeking treatment etc). And yet this is on a far greater scale than any of those and they are so blasé about it.

I've been thinking back to when Mermaids were last in the news ... The Big Lottery Fund review noted that they were a young charity that had grown quickly in a challenging environment ... Para 12.3 of their review talks about the importance of governance and infrastructure, and recommends that the charity receive support from the BLF and agree milestones for progress wrt quality assurance systems regarding and I quote, "communications, support services and training".

That was back in Feb. I think the question needs to be asked, was that set in motion or was it a load of convenient flannel to deflect from the fact that they were going to give the half a million to an organisation ill-equipped for such a major role?

It's a charity with a profile and influence way beyond its ability to manage. It's totally out of its depth. It doesn't understand even the most basis principles of safeguarding on any level or in any area because it has a total lack of skill. All it is, is based on feelings. You can't base competency on feelings.

This is why we have experts who train for years in their field.

When you say you've had enough of experts and you know better than people like doctors with an understanding of medical ethics, instead preferring to cosy up to doctors who are struck off, this is what happens.

I do hope someone is busy pointing Maugham in the direction of the charity's relationship with the Webberely's.

This charity has now breached ideas governing medical ethics, data protection, and child protection safeguarding, is against evidence based medicine and doesn't know how to read or interprete statistics accurately.

I am struggling to see its strengths other than PR with its deliberate use of vulnerable kids for its wider political aims without any form of institutional or framework constraint.

In fairness the ICO was so late coming out with key guidance that’s lot of people kept their privacy notices under review until the last minute.
Objectively however theirs lacks transparency on some very very important issues. Many are in the same boat of course. But these guys might get looked at now. If I was them I try and get ahead and improve the transparency of my disclosures. A better use of time than smearing journalists as transphobic, I think.

If Mermaids goes up in flames then questions start to be asked about every organisation who didnt do their due diligence over them.

That'll be the interesting bit tbh...