Data privacy breach by the city Bonn residents get strangers' quarantine orders
Bonn · Anyone who has to go into quarantine receives a corresponding order from the city of Bonn. Now, however, a mishap has happened in the city council, affected people have not only received their own findings in the letter.
The city of Bonn has suffered a data protection mishap: According to its own information, the administration accidentally printed quarantine orders on both sides and sent them out. Accordingly, affected persons received the notice for another person on the back of the letter. The letters had been sent this Monday and Tuesday and refer to the period January 23-25. It is unclear how many people are affected. The city estimates anywhere from 44 to "a low three-digit number.“
"For data protection reasons, this is of course a particularly serious incident for which we apologise," explains Monika Hörig, press spokeswoman for the city of Bonn. The city explains the glitch by saying that the default double-sided printing setting had not been deactivated.The city asks all recipients of such an order to ignore the back pages and not to pass on the data. All those affected are now to be written to again. They are to receive a new quarantine order in addition to a letter with an explanation and an apology.
(Original text: ga, Translation: Mareike Graepel)
