John Goddard of The Toronto Star reports that private information about 1,393 tenants — including names, addresses, phone numbers, social insurance numbers, mental health issues, children’s names, ages, where the children go to school, and landlord disputes — could be accessed online in a database maintained by Landlord’s Source Centre.
A tenant discovered the problem after following a link in some correspondence he received. By changing one number in the url, he could access others’ data.
Company operations officer Smith said flatly that no such database exists.
“To be clear, we don’t have a database with tenant information, with tenants’ social (insurance numbers) etc.,” she said early yesterday, before such information was accessed from the newsroom. Subsequent phone calls and emails to Smith for clarification went unanswered all day.