Abuse inquiry hit with £200k fine by ICO after bulk email error
The Information Commissioner’s Office has served a £200,000 monetary penalty notice on the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) after it sent a bulk email that identified possible victims of non-recent child sexual abuse.
The Inquiry, set up in 2014 to investigate the extent to which institutions failed to protect children from sexual abuse, did not keep confidential and sensitive personal information secure, the ICO said, and so breached the Data Protection Act 1998.
The background to the ICO investigation was that on 27 February 2017, an IICSA staff member sent a blind carbon copy (bcc) email to 90 Inquiry participants telling them about a public hearing.
After noticing an error in the email, a correction was sent but email addresses were entered into the ‘to’ field, instead of the ‘bcc’ field by mistake.
This allowed the recipients to see each other’s email addresses, identifying them as possible victims of child sexual abuse, the ICO said.
Fifty-two of the email addresses contained the full names of the participants or had a full name label attached.
The Inquiry was alerted to the breach by a recipient of the email who entered two further email addresses into the ‘to’ field before clicking on ‘Reply All’.
The Inquiry then sent three emails asking the recipients to delete the original email and not to circulate further. One of these emails generated 39 ‘Reply All’ emails, the ICO said.
The ICO said its investigation found:
- The Inquiry failed to use an email account that could send a separate email to each participant;
- The Inquiry failed to provide staff with any (or any adequate) guidance or training on the importance of double checking that the participant’s email addresses were entered into the ‘bcc’ field;
- The Inquiry hired an IT company to manage the mailing list and relied on advice from the company that it would prevent individuals from replying to the entire list;
- In July 2017 a recipient clicked on ‘Reply All’ in response to an email from the Inquiry, via the mailing list, and revealed their email to the entire list;
- The Inquiry breached their own privacy notice by sharing participants’ emails addresses with the IT company without their consent.
The Inquiry and the ICO received 22 complaints about the security breach, and one complainant told the ICO he was “very distressed” by the security breach. IICSA has since apologised to the affected individuals.
The case was dealt with under the provisions and maximum penalties of the Data Protection Act 1998, and not the 2018 Act which has replaced it, because of the date of the breach.
ICO Director of Investigations Steve Eckersley said: “This incident placed vulnerable people at risk, which is concerning. IICSA should and could have done more to ensure this did not happen.
“People’s email addresses can be searched via social networks and search engines, so the risk that they could be identified was significant.”
Commenting on the monetary penalty, IICSA said: "The Inquiry takes its data protection obligations very seriously and we have apologised to those affected by the data breach.
"After a wide-ranging review by external experts, we have amended our handling processes for personal data to ensure they are robust and the risk of a further breach is minimised."
It added that the ICO had acknowledged that the Inquiry apologised immediately when the breach came to light and took into account its swift action in reviewing and amending the way it handles data.
