OOPS! City Of Hamilton Leaks Names And Emails Of 450 Voters

Well, this is a wee bit embarrassing for the City Of Hamilton:

The City of Hamilton says it “regrets” exposing the names and email addresses of hundreds of registered voters in a privacy breach Thursday.

The breach impacted approximately 450 individuals, the city said in a statement provided Friday, all of whom had registered to use the Vote by Mail process.

“Multiple email addresses were inadvertently entered in the to: line of the email instead of the bcc: line, exposing email addresses to all recipients of the email message,” the city said.

That almost sounds to me like this was done by a human being rather than an automated mailing program like Mail Chimp or Constant Contact. Because those programs would not have done this. A human can easily screw this up and create this exact situation. But at least the city is sorry for this:

Regardless, this screw up has been reported  Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, and I am sure that we’ll not only get a lot more details, but we’ll also find out what the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario has in mind to remedy this situation. And by that I mean take action to make sure that it doesn’t happen again and there’s some accountability as well.

Leave a Reply

%d