Province hit with hundreds of privacy-breach complaints
Computer glitches and human error account for many information breaches investigated by the Information and Privacy Commissioner.

thestar.com
July 23, 2015
By Richard J. Brennan

Ontario has been hit with more than 200 privacy complaints about the mishandling of personal information by the provincial government or its agencies over the past 18 months, according to the information and privacy commissioner.

Most of them can be chalked up to human error or computer glitches, but the common thread in the complaints is that detailed personal information ended up in the wrong hands.

As recently as last week, a misdialed fax machine was blamed for a privacy breach affecting hundreds of Ontario Disability Support Program recipients in Hamilton.

While intentional breaches are rare, the consequences from unintentional breaches are the same.

“It’s disappointing that these things continue to happen,” Information and Privacy Commissioner Brian Beamish told the Star.

In 2014 the Information and Privacy Commissioner’s office received 61 reports of breaches from provincial ministries and government agencies, and 73 from individuals, plus nine others that the office initiated on its own, Beamish said. This year so far there have been 29 from ministries and agencies, 35 from individuals and four self-initiated.

The Ministry of Community and Social Services accounted for some of the breaches, including two associated with the troubled $242-million Social Assistance Management System (SAMS) computer system and the inadvertent Hamilton release.

In March, social insurance numbers of more than 700 welfare and disability support program recipients were disclosed to third parties, along with the amount of assistance they received last year.

The province blamed the privacy breach involving the misdirected T5 forms on an “interface” - software that built by IBM as part of the SAMS contract. The software pulled data from the troubled system. SAMS manages case files, including benefit payments, for hundreds of thousands of the province’s Ontario Works and Ontario Disability Support Program recipients.

In Hamilton recently, personal information for 500 disability recipients in the city was “inadvertently” sent to a private law firm. The disclosed information included names, mailing addresses and shelter payment amounts for March 2015.

“There is a couple of types of carelessness. One is punching in a wrong number of a fax machine...or maybe not enough care taken up front in realizing there may be some privacy implications in the design (in a computer program),” Beamish said.

He said human errors will never be eliminated but efforts should be made just the same to blunt the impact when mistakes are made.