Davey Winder
Wednesday, 09 July 2008 07:30
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The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee is urging the Government to introduce legislation to make banks pay for cybercrime coupled with a data security breach disclosure law for the UK.
There is a common perception amongst the British public and beyond,
that members of the House of Lords can pretty much be summed up as a
bunch of old duffers. Anyone who has watched the
Parliament TV channel and seen their Lordships sleeping through
debates and generally doing a good impression of Mr Burns and Grandpa Simpson will
not disagree.
So when it decides to tackle an issue such as
crime on the Internet, you might expect to be in for a roller coaster
ride of technological misunderstanding and cultural misapprehension.
Yet the
House of Lords Science and Technology Committee
has actually managed to sit down, stay awake, and produce some
reasonable recommendations in its report published Tuesday.
The
follow-up report on Personal Internet Security
calls on the Government to do more to protect the citizen from
cybercrime.
One of the more controversial recommendations being that there should
be legislation "to establish the principle that banks be held
responsible for losses incurred by electronic fraud."
The Committee argues that it's just not satisfied with the official
Government position, which says the existing Banking Code offers
sufficient consumer protection. "The Committee received evidence that
where a pin or password is used in an online fraud banks often refuse
to refund customers claiming they must have been negligent or complicit
in the fraud" their Lordships report. They also suggest that the
Financial Services Ombudsman and the courts do not offer an adequate
method of redress for customers whose banks refuse to cover their
losses. "If banks were forced to accept liability for online fraud this
would provide an incentive for them to improve the security of their
online banking operations."
Hey, the old duffers might just have a point you know!
In fact, they have two more points. Read on to find out what they might be...
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