None
Financial penalty
Reprimand, no fine
15 March 2024
Date on the register
UK GDPR
Law relied on
DPA 2018 section 35, DPA 2018 section 40
Criminal justice
Sector
26 actions on the register
In one line
The ICO issued Dover Harbour Board with a reprimand on 15 March 2024 under the UK General Data Protection Regulation. No financial penalty attaches to it.
01The record
- Organisation named
- Dover Harbour Board
- Action
- Reprimand
- Date published
- 15 March 2024
- Register year
- 2024
- Law relied on
- UK GDPR
- Provisions cited
- DPA 2018 section 35, DPA 2018 section 40, UK GDPR Article 58(2)(b)
- Penalty
- None (not a financial penalty)
- Sector on the register
- Criminal justice
- ICO register reference
- 17348
- Register status
- Published on the ICO enforcement register, 4 September 2026
- Notice documents
- 1 PDF published by the ICO
- Sector share of register
- 26 of 216 actions (12%)
- Actions published that year
- 52
- Actions under this law
- 95
- Position on the register
- 135th of 216, oldest first
- Published the same day
- 2 actions dated 15 March 2024
02What happened, and where it sits
Dover Harbour Board received an ICO reprimand on 15 March 2024. The Commissioner acted under the UK General Data Protection Regulation, citing DPA 2018 section 35, DPA 2018 section 40 and UK GDPR Article 58(2)(b). A formal criticism on the public record. A reprimand carries no fine and no order, but it is published and the ICO expects the shortcomings named in it to be fixed.
No sum is attached to this action. Reprimands are corrective, not financial, which is why Dover Harbour Board appears on the register without a figure beside it.
Dover Harbour Board is filed under Criminal justice, which accounts for 26 of the 216 actions on the register (12%). In 2024 the ICO published 52 enforcement actions in total, 18 of them reprimands. 95 actions on the register name UK GDPR.
Counted from the oldest entry forward, this is the 135th of 216 actions on the register and the 17th of 26 in Criminal justice. The ICO published 2 actions on 15 March 2024, so this one was part of a batch: Chief Constable of Kent Police (reprimand). The ICO publishes one document for this action, 467 KB in total: "20240305-dover-harbour-board-reprimand". It is the authority for everything on this page.
03The ICO's own account
A reprimand is being issued to Dover Harbour Board in respect of the creation and use of a social media distribution group, initially created in WhatsApp but later migrated to Telegram. From the evidence provided to the ICO, the distribution groups were used by multiple UK police forces and international law enforcement agencies for the purpose of combatting vehicle crime. The distribution groups were created by an officer from the Port of Dover Police using his personal mobile phone without organisational oversight or compliance with data protection legislation.
The law behind this action
UK GDPR
The UK GDPR is the data protection regime the ICO enforces against controllers and processors. Its upper tier is capped at £17.5 million or 4% of total worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher.
What a reprimand does
A formal criticism on the public record. A reprimand carries no fine and no order, but it is published and the ICO expects the shortcomings named in it to be fixed.
Published notice
- PDF20240305-dover-harbour-board-reprimand(467 KB)
04Published the same day
| Organisation | Date | Action | Law | Penalty |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chief Constable of Kent Police | 15 Mar 2024 | Reprimand | Not stated | - |
05Nearest entries on the register
| Organisation | Date | Action | Law | Penalty |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chief Constable West Midlands Police | 1 Mar 2024 | Reprimand | UK GDPR | - |
| Chief Constable Devon and Cornwall Police | 2 Feb 2024 | Reprimand | UK GDPR | - |
| Chief Constable Dorset Police | 2 Feb 2024 | Reprimand | UK GDPR | - |
| Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) | 26 Oct 2023 | Reprimand | UK GDPR | - |
| Chief Constable West Mercia Police and Chief Constable Warwickshire Police | 6 Oct 2023 | Reprimand | UK GDPR | - |
All Criminal justice actions/All 2024 actions/The full register
06Work out an exposure of your own
Article 83 fine calculator
Estimate upper and lower tier exposure from turnover and infringement type, on the same scale the ICO works to.
How a fine is calculated
The Article 83(2) factors, the turnover caps, and how a regulator gets from a contravention to a number.
The ICO profile
How the UK regulator works post-Brexit, the £17.5M and £8.7M UK GDPR caps, and its divergence from the EU regime.
Provenance and independence
Source: ICO enforcement register (ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/enforcement/), as published on 4 September 2026. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
GDPRFine.com is an independent tracker of ICO enforcement. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the Information Commissioner's Office, and it uses no ICO branding. Where the ICO's own wording is reproduced it is quoted and attributed; everything else on these pages is our own summary of the published record.
The ICO's register held 222 entries on that date. 6 of them are prosecutions of named individuals, with ages and home towns in the ICO's own summary. This tracker indexes organisations, so those 6 are excluded and every count on these pages is out of 216. They remain on the ICO's own register.
An entry says what the Commissioner did on the date shown. It is not a statement about the organisation today, and the ICO can amend or remove a register entry at any time. Amounts and provisions are as published by the ICO; where the published notice does not state a figure or name a provision, these pages say so rather than filling the gap. This entry was read from the register page at https://ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/enforcement/2024/03/dover-harbour-board/.
Register: ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/enforcement/. Corrections: questions@gdprfine.com.