An embarrassing privacy breach by an employee of the Australian immigration department resulted in the personal details of world leaders who attended the G20 summit last year being leaked. Leaked information included visa details, passport numbers as well as other personal identifiers of all world leaders who attended the summit in Australia. The details were inadvertently emailed to organizers of the Asian Cup football tournament.
Just in case you’re wondering who the world leaders were, in attendance at G20 last year were the likes of U.S. President Barack Obama, Russian supremo Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, China’s President Xi Jinping, as well as prime ministers of the UK, India and Japan.
According to The Guardian this information was mistakenly emailed to a member of the local organizing committee of the Asian Cup by an employee of the Australian immigration department. An email concerning the subsequent investigation obtained by the scribe under Australia’s freedom of information laws reveals:
“The cause of the breach was human error. [Redacted] failed to check that the autofill function in Microsoft Outlook had entered the correct person’s details into the email ‘To’ field. This led to the email being sent to the wrong person.”
Fortunately this didn’t turn into an international incident. The Asian Cup committee says that they promptly deleted the email, even from the trash folder, so it was never in the public domain.
However since it’s not clear if the world leaders were identified of this breach the Australian immigration department might find itself in breach of privacy laws in some of their countries.
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