Australian Gov't Loses Privacy Alert Subscription Information In the Mail 33
Posted
by
timothy
from the this-is-a-data-breach dept.
from the this-is-a-data-breach dept.
First time accepted submitter darinfp writes "As an Australian, I'd like to announce a new definition of the word 'Irony.' A government contractor put a list of users and details in the mail and it was lost. The list contained users subscribed to the government's privacy breach alert system."
Re:Let's get it started (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd say it's a pretty good example of irony, from wikipedia "A situation is often said to be ironic (situational irony) if the actions taken have an effect exactly opposite from what was intended [wikipedia.org]".
People were concerned about their privacy so they subscribed to a breach notification list, instead they had their privacy potentially violated as a result of the list that was supposed to notify them.
I suppose a better irony would be if they were subscribers to some sort of breach avoidance system but it's still a pretty ironic situation.
In the mail? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why were they taking information, which they have electronically, and putting it on a physical medium where it loses its usability, presumably so someone could use it. And they used regular mail? Seriously? Is this April fools or something, this is just too much fail to be real.
legally protect, unlike digital networks (Score:3, Insightful)
atleast the packet has legal protection
in australia, the government owned physical packet switching network known as 'australia post' has huge legal protection over every single packet switchted through the network, unlike digital networks. even retaining the header (sender/reciever) data is illegal, and any deep packet inspection will be met with the full force of the federal police. so from a legal perspective the data is a lot safer in post than in your email inbox