Implications of the Home Office data breach

What sanctions might result from the recent Home Office data breach, and how does it relate to the transparency agenda?

News emerged yesterday, through the rather unusual route of a statement to Parliament by Mark Harper, Minister for Immigration, that a spreadsheet containing the personal information of almost 1600 people had been inadvertently published by the Home Office on a government website. The minister’s statement says

between 15 and 28 October 2013 some personal data was available on the Home Office website as part of a spreadsheet alongside the regular data set in error. This was identified by Home Office officials on 28 October 2013 and the personal information was  removed immediately. The personal data related to the names of 1,598 main applicants in the family returns process, their date of birth and limited details about their immigration case type and status

On these conceded facts this would appear to be a clear breach of the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA), and, specifically, the principles of Schedule 1 to the Act which require that processing be fair and lawful, and that appropriate technical and organisational measures shall be taken against unauthorised or unlawful processing of personal data. But what are the implications of this?

By virtue of section 4(4) of the DPA a data controller – in this instance the Home Office – must comply with those principles. A serious contravention of them, of a kind which is likely to cause substantial damage or substantial distress, can (by section 55A) invoke the powers of the Information Commissioner’s Office (IC) to serve a monetary penalty notice, to a maximum of £500,000. Whether the IC would exercise his discretion to do so would depend on various factors. Firstly, he would need to satisfy himself whether the personal data involved was “sensitive”. Sensitive personal data is afforded greater protection by the DPA, and breaches involving it are accordingly more serious. We are told that the information involved here consisted of people’s names, dates of birth, and their immigration status. Information about a person’s racial or ethnic origin is sensitive personal data – could one derive or infer that from the mistakenly disclosed information? This will be an important question to answer. But, additionally and more simply, it seems that these were “illegal immigrants” – the data was related to immigration family returns, and this would certainly seem to imply either the commission or alleged commission of an offence by those whose data was exposed, and this would also move the data into the category of “sensitive”.

Whether the apparent contravention was likely to cause substantial damage or substantial distress is less clear. The minister points out that there appear to have been fewer than thirty page views, but that we don’t know whether any of those people accessed or downloaded the data. But this perhaps overlooks the part of the statutory scheme which talks about whether the contravention was “of a kind likely” to cause the damage or distress. If for instance, this incident, which we are told is being investigated by the IC, is a symptom of inappropriate or insufficient data security measures, then that factor, rather than this discrete incident, could potentially give rise to sanctions. Also relevant might be what efforts the Home Office has taken to ensure that cached versions of the data have been removed from the internet – it is remarkably easy for information quickly to be captured and mirrored elsewhere, by automated web services.

The IC’s powers are not limited, however, to issuing monetary penalties. He can also issue enforcement notices requiring data controllers to take specified actions, and a breach of an enforcement notice can be a criminal offence. Less seriously, he can simply make a determination as to whether there is likely to have been a breach of the DPA. And he can take informal action, requiring a responsible person at the ministry to sign an undertaking to improve compliance.

The transparency agenda

What I also find noteworthy is that the minister prefaces his statement with remarks about the government’s commitment

to openness and transparency to enable the public to hold the government and other public bodies to account. This government has made more data available than ever before…

These are laudable aims and actions, but, I have written before that the transparency agenda carries with it risks that, in the rush to publish more and more data, there will be privacy and data protection breaches. And if the government and the IC, as regulator, do not do more to alert people to these risks they must be aware that they risk being seen as complicit in such breaches. As I said in my piece for The Guardian

The IC must work with the government to offer advice direct to chief executives and those responsible for risk…So far these disclosure errors do not appear to have led to harm to those individuals whose private information was compromised, but, without further action, I fear it is only a matter of time.