Red faces at the Electoral Commission
Oh dear! It seems that my friends at the Electoral Commission may be in danger of falling foul of a fellow regulator, the Data Protection Registrar.
On Friday afternoon the Electoral Commission sent out one of their regular emails to several dozen people on their lists who are interested in the latest guidance on the upcoming elections for police and crime commissioners (PCCs). Only, the email accidentally included the email addresses of everybody it was sent to, contrary to data protection rules.
Red faces all round, especially within a body which has to deal with quite a lot of data protection matters.
Then, today, having realised its error, the Electoral Commission made things worse by sending out a recall message. The trouble was this message did the same thing again, and included the addresses of everyone on the list! Faces even redder.
The trouble is that some of these addresses may be quite sensitive. They include not just people working within police forces, but may also include some people who are, or were, interested in standing for election, but who have never publicly declared their interest. I am told that at least one PCC campaign manager is very annoyed at what has happened.
This afternoon Victoria Fox of the Electoral Commission sent out a third email to everyone on its PCC list. This time they got it right, and apologised for the original error in printing everyone’s address (though ignoring the second one).
“I apologise for this mistake on our part. It falls short of the standards we set for ourselves as an organisation and I will be looking into what happened so as to ensure it does not occur again.”
Fox continued: “If you have already opened the original email of 29th June, could I kindly ask you to delete it so that you no longer have access to any of the other email addresses.”
As if anyone will actually do that.
And Ms Fox advised recipients, on advice from the information commissioner, that if they were worried “you may also wish to consider whether you wish to change your own email address”.
That’ll be convenient.
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