British Airways is set to be fined more than £183 million over a customer data breach, the airline has announced.
Alex Cruz, British Airways chairman and chief executive, said he was “surprised and disappointed” by the proposal from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
Willie Walsh, boss of the British Airways’ parent company International Airlines Group, pledged to “defend the airline’s position vigorously, including making any necessary appeals”.
READ MORE: Axing BA jobs not to blame for IT chaos, says boss
The ICO has indicated that it plans to impose a penalty of £183.4 million, which represents 1.5% of the airline’s annual turnover.
Details of the data breach were made public on September 6 and October 25 last year.
It relates to the theft of customers’ personal and financial information between August 21 2018 and September 5 2018 from the website ba.com and the airline’s mobile app.
The airline initially said around 380,000 payment cards had been compromised.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here