Ryan Price reports on The Manchester Evening News:
The Post Office has agreed to pay compensation to hundreds of former subpostmasters whose names and addresses were accidentally leaked during a data breach last year.
Last June, the personal details of 555 victims of the Horizon IT scandal were published on the Post Office’s website.
What caught DataBreaches’ eye is the following:
Now, the company has confirmed it will pay each of the individuals affected either £5,000 or £3,500, depending on whether they were living at the address leaked at the time. They added that higher claims may be pursued in “special cases”.
What makes this data leak so worrisome or problematic that there is such a high compensation rate? Names and addresses are usually not that huge a deal, but these were linked to the Horizon IT scandal — a case in which faulty software led to the prosecution of over 900 postmasters in the UK. At the time of the leak, The Guardian reported:
The state-owned body published the personal details of 555 people who had been involved in suing the Post Office in a high court lawsuit in 2019. It paved the way for post office operators convicted of theft and false accounting to be exonerated by the courts.
The lawsuit was led by Sir Alan Bates, the campaigner who was played by actor Toby Jones in the ITV hit drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office this year, which portrayed his fight for justice and ignited a public furore about the scandal caused by faulty Horizon IT software.
So having had their lives ruined — some having suffered bankruptcy, prison sentences and homelessness after wrongful prosecutions — they now had their names and addresses leaked publicly by the Post Office? This was not just a routine “leak” of little consequence to many of those affected.