"Human error" is being blamed for the privacy breach, which happened on public transport in Wellington. Photo / Cliffano Subagio
"Human error" is being blamed for the privacy breach, which happened on public transport in Wellington. Photo / Cliffano Subagio
A government official left a folder behind on Wellington public transport containing the private details of 16 individuals and groups.
Department of Internal Affairs chief executive Paul James has apologised for the mistake, while Internal Affairs Minister Jan Tinetti is asking for the incident to be thoroughly investigated.
"When my office was alerted to this breach, I immediately requested DIA reach out to those affected so they were notified and the appropriate support was put in place for them," Tinetti told the Herald.
"I also asked for the chief executive to investigate how this human error occurred, and how to minimise the risk of this ever happening again. I have been assured this was an isolated incident of human error."
The lapse took place on March 18, when a DIA staff member disembarked from public transport but left behind a folder full of submissions.
They were on the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Urgent Interim Classification of Publications and Prevention of Online Harm) Amendment Bill, which aims to fill the holes in New Zealand's digital protection landscape that were exposed following the March 15 terrorist attack.
James said the papers were not policy papers or Cabinet papers.
"We are taking this incident seriously and have apologised unreservedly to the submitters for this mistake. It shouldn't have happened and we are very sorry.
"We take the privacy of those we deal with very seriously and are ensuring all our staff are reminded about the proper way to manage information to avoid this happening again."
He said the submissions came from a mixture of individuals and groups, and some of them had already been publicly released.
Minister of Internal Affairs Jan Tinetti has asked for support to be offered to those who had their privacy breached. Photo / Mark Mitchell
The DIA was in contact with the transport provider, but the folder has not been found.
A spokesman for the Privacy Commissioner said the office had been made aware of the incident, and affected persons can lay a complaint if they wanted to.
National Party internal affairs spokesman Todd Muller said what happened was "completely unacceptable".
"And I expect the minister to make that clear in the strongest possible terms to the chief executive.
"The DIA need to realise that it's not just a folder with people's names and addresses. When people hand over this information, they're handing over a little bit of themselves, and there's an obligation that in doing that, actually, it's going to be protected.
"They're not meeting their side of that contractual bargain when they're so careless with people's personal information."
