Northern Ireland DFP loses data
Northern Ireland’s Department of Finance and Personnel has been penalised by the Information Commissioner’s Office for a major loss of people’s personal data.
The department has been made to sign a formal undertaking to improve data security after it had 12 laptops stolen, two of which contained personal data on approximately 37,000 people. This included payroll, employment and health data, although not all records contained these categories.
The ICO said this amounted to a breach of the Data Protection Act (DPA). Assistant information commissioner Mick Gorrill said: “This was a major data security breach involving many thousands of people’s personal information. Storing large volumes of personal information on portable devices is unnecessarily risky.”