A4e and the Data Protection Act violation
Post Categories: Action 4 Employment • a4e • emma harrison
Tags: a4e, Data Protection Act, stolen laptops
A4e have managed to lose 24,000 peoples details. This not under New Deal, Flexible New Deal or any other welfare contract that they have but the Community Legal Advice Centre contract. This shows deep concern about how they do not care about peoples personal information – so if you have A4e as a provider or another provider whom is subcontracted from A4e, you should be concerned:-
- The centres are in Hull and Leicester so what was a laptop doing in London with all their clients details on?
- They did not have any procedures in place to prevent the laptop being stolen – i.e. not letting employees take them home, and should the employee have taken in home it should not have been left on display
- The laptop data was not encrypted or protected – the data was on local hard drive not on a remote server desktop (i.e. where password could be changed after the burglary to prevent the information being seen). It also wasn’t on a secure USB stick where the information could have been isolated from the laptop.
- The Burglary happened on the 19th June 2010 – wasn’t published on A4e website or in the news until 29th june 2010 (I make that 9-10 days) although I am sure the letters would have been sent out before then
- A4e calls this “Data Theft” – I call this bullshit. The data wasn’t stolen… the laptop was stolen which just happened (due to A4e’s poor Data Protection procedures) to be on it.
- BBC News: Laptop with personal data of 24,000 people is stolen
- Watching A4e: Oops! (Thanks to Watching A4e who brought this to my attention)
- The Void: A4e Lose Details of 24,000 People
0808 156 6460
If you are a client of A4e under any contract (welfare-to-work or Community Legal Advice) you should ring the above Data Theft helpline. Ask they what they are doing to ensure your data doesn’t get lost like this or if you are affected ask whether the laptop has been recovered and what compensation you can get.
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Can’t these private contractors get anything right?
This one involved people with legal cases for Devil’s sake.
Exactly. The legal contract is just a small one. New Deal and Flexible New Deal contracts (which arent affected in “this” case) are much larger and if they are that careless with legal cases then whats with our data? Half people where we are have to go to Reed a subcontractor for A4e. TNG?YCMA not much better neither.