When the ICO recieve a complaint they usually send an initial notification email to the data controller to advise that a case officer will be assigned in due course.

Well, unless it relates to a serious or ongoing data breach, which tends to be triaged immediately into an active investigation.

Initial notification letters do usually recommend trying to resolve the issue with the data subject in the interim though.

That probably spooked Reddit into moving your case up the priority list as I imagine they’ve got a pretty substantial backlog of SAR, erasure and objection requests, considering the circumstances.

The response window for most of those rights is 30 calendar days + extensions if applicable, so they could also have just been responding as late as allowed, accounting for aforementioned probable backlog.

Do let us know when the ICO gets back to you though, will be fascinating to hear what they have to say.

It looks like the TLD was sold off to a private business by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority in 1997, with those rights subsequently being sold on to other corporations.

The British government have issued an FOI response advising that they recieve no funds from .io domain registrations. The Chagos Islanders still don’t benefit, but it looks like that’d need to be squared with a hedge fund rather than a government.

…It is weird that territorial domains can be auctioned off in the first place though.

Well, one context I’m already familiar with is the counter-terrorism duty in the UK. There is a program called Prevent that is designed to tackle radicalisation risk that could result in terrorism or non-violent extremism.

These programs basically work by placing a duty on certain types of organisation to report concerning behaviours that could result in radicalisation. An example would be a teacher or social worker overhearing a teenager espousing violent ideological positions that they’d been exposed to online.

This then results in a referral to the local counter-terrorism police unit, who carry out an assessment to determine the level of vulnerability and risk. Far-right ideologies including fascism can be accounted for here. Depending on the outcome, this may result in the referral being closed, or a multi-agency support plan being developed for the individual.

In that narrow band of circumstances, determining someone’s susceptibility to fascism as an extremist ideology is warranted. That’s in the context of a reactive specialist law enforcement assessment, when there is a justifiable national security interest in the prevention of terrorism.

That said, this is very different to indiscriminate profiling on a population level. If everyone in the UK was subject to mandatory fascism assessments, that would be massively intrusive and disproportionate, and an enormous infringement of civil liberties - even if the government attempted to justify it on the same national security basis described above.

In what context?

Who’d be doing the identifying, how would they be doing it, and what would they be using that information for?

‘Should’ is a question of desirability, so the above is really critically important.