According to a recent research, public bodies are unintentionally releasing confidential personal data. According to the results of the research, 154 accidental data leaks made by UK councils, government bodies, police, the NHS and other agencies have been recorded over the last 6 years. In other words, confidential data is being accidentally released every two weeks on average.

As you know, public bodies operate under a code of conduct that requires personal data to be removed or anonymized before data release.

The first concerns were raised after a county council in the UK accidentally published information on over 1,400 children earlier in 2015. The information included names, addresses, religion and special educational needs status. The leak was discovered within a few hours of publication, data was removed, and the incident was reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

The statistics says that councils are the worst offenders, with 33% of the leak originating from local government. In many cases, there are repeat offenders: for example, the Home Office released confidential data twice, and so did the courts service in response to FOI requests. Several months ago, Greater Manchester police released names, ranks and internal details of police officers.

One large data breach occurred three years ago, when Islington council mistakenly released an FOI response containing personal details (sexuality and names) of more than 2,300 individuals or families. Overall, Islington has had 5 troubling data breaches for the last 6 years. There was also a case where a council accidentally included license plate details of more than 30,000 people who had got parking tickets.