Scotland Yard has admitted inadvertently sharing the email addresses of more than 1,000 victims of crime with other victims. In total 1,136 emails were sent out “in human error” on Monday, police said. No other personal details were revealed and police are contacting everyone affected to explain what happened and to apologise, Scotland Yard confirmed….
Month: February 2012
NZ: 'Imminent’ changes to privacy law
Jen de Montalk reports: Health sector workers have two chances to make submissions on proposed amendments to the Privacy Act 1993 which will affect how health data is shared, according to the privacy commissioner. The privacy commissioner’s office has been working alongside the Law Commission to update the way agencies delivering public services use and…
Court says France cannot use stolen bank data for searches
AFP reports: France’s highest appeals court has ruled that authorities may not use a list of 3,000 people suspected of tax evasion as a basis to conduct searches due to its illicit origin. French authorities in January 2009 acted on a Swiss warrant and seized data about global banking giant HSBC’s customers from former computer…
UK: Gosport podiatrist's confidential records laptop stolen
BBC reports: A laptop containing personal and medical information of up to 1,500 people has been stolen from a podiatry clinic in Hampshire. The Zoostorm laptop, containing unencrypted data, was taken from the Walking On Air clinic in Gosport on Tuesday. Podiatrist Natasha Townsend said the laptop did have a password. The Information Commissioner’s Office…
Report: Data breaches from unencrypted devices up 525% in 2011
Dan Bowman reports on a new report by Redspin that analyzed breaches reported to HHS: According to the report, nearly 40 percent of all major PHI breaches occurred on a laptop or other portable media device, a problem the authors say isn’t likely to go away anytime soon. […] In the last year alone, data…
Follow-up: Birmingham woman sentenced to 39 months in prison in Trinity Medical Center records theft
There’s a follow-up to a case previously noted on this blog where a woman hopped over a counter at Trinity Medical Center (formerly known as Montclair Baptist Medical Center) and stole logs with patient information. Kent Faulk reports: A Birmingham woman, who had pleaded guilty in the theft, from Trinity Medical Center, of records that contained…