Second massive privacy breach at EQC revealed

new-zealand-labour-party

Thu Mar 28 2013 13:00:00 GMT+1300 (New Zealand Daylight Time)

Second massive privacy breach at EQC revealed

Thursday, 28 March 2013, 3:35 pm
Press Release: New Zealand Labour Party

Lianne
DALZIEL
Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Spokesperson
Earthquake Commission Spokesperson

28 March 2013 MEDIA STATEMENT
Second massive privacy breach at EQC revealed

Labour has today revealed that there has been another massive breach of the privacy of thousands of Cantabrians by EQC despite the Government protesting that the previous incident was a one-off and simply ‘human error’.

“This is an absolute scandal and proof that there is a systemic problem with the security of electronic data held by EQC and other agencies across the entire state sector,” said Labour’s Earthquake Commission spokesperson Lianne Dalziel.

“Today I received information that a month ago EQC sent an email to a client about his claim that had a spreadsheet attached containing private and confidential information from over 2000 other Cantabrians, including their names and details of bank cheques.

“This client sent a message to EQC this week via its website and asked for the chief executive to contact him but he hasn’t heard back.

“The scale of the breaches at EQC is staggering. Thousands of Cantabrians have had their private information leaked because of slack information protection systems. And that has happened under Gerry Brownlee’s watch.

“Yet his first response is to blame the messenger rather than take immediate action to prevent these kind of breaches.

“New Zealanders take their privacy very seriously. But this Government has let them down time and time again. We’ve now had major breaches at EQC, ACC, MSD, IRD, Corrections and Novopay.

“What will it take for this Government to act? It’s time to stop the flippant responses such as Gerry Brownlee dismissing it as ‘similar to putting the wrong address on an envelope’ and give New Zealanders the confidence they deserve that their information is safe,” said Lianne Dalziel.

ENDS

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