AU: Child services breaches foster kids’ privacy at least 58 times: report

Beau Donelly reports:

A car was doused in petrol in one of six “significant” cases where children or carers were put in danger as a direct result of the leak-plagued child protection department’s own breaches, a review has uncovered.

The state government has put vulnerable children and foster carers “at direct risk of harm” at least 58 times in the past five years.

But the real number of families whose safety was compromised is likely to be higher, reviewer John Leatherland says in his report, released on Thursday evening.

This is the type of report that I wish everyone would read, although I haven’t yet found a copy of the report itself. While breaches involving tens of millions of login credentials grab and stay in the headlines, there are smaller breaches every day that put people at serious risk. Kudos to The Age whose previous reporting on this issue and exposure of risks resulted in the review.

Donelly provides examples from the report that make it clear how serious an issue these breaches can be. Most of the breaches appear to be what we usually categorize as “human error, ” such as failing to redact information or verbally breaching privacy, losing USBs, laptops or paperwork, mailing or emailing errors, and exposing information on a web site or Facebook.