The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has announced that a monetary penalty notice has been served on Aberdeen City Council after inadequate homeworking arrangements led to 39 pages of personal data being uploaded onto the internet by a Council employee. The council has been fined £100,000.
The incident occurred in November 2011, after a home working employee obtained four documents to work on. It is not clear whether they were obtained from a council e-mail account or via a USB stick, but the employee’s system was configured so that the files were automatically saved in the “My Documents” folder. Somehow – and this part is not clear – the employee must have activated something on the computer that automatically uploaded all the contents of the “My Documents” folder to the Internet. The employee would later state that the computer was second-hand and a previous owner must have installed some program on it that the employee did not know about.
The four documents contained minutes of a meeting on children and other highly personal and sensitive information on children involved with the council’s social work services, including details of crime, details, of family members, and other sensitive information. The exact number of children involved is not known, but some of the records also included their names, addresses, and dates of birth.
The breach was discovered on February 15, 2012 by another employee who had run a search engine query on his own name, and the files were removed from the internet within four hours. But a newspaper was made aware of the breach and although they didn’t publish anything until after the files were removed, had access to the files.
The fine was imposed for failure to have adequate technical and organizational policies and procedures in place.
View a PDF of the Aberdeen City Council monetary penalty notice