Plymouth City Council has apologised after breaching the personal data of around 500 families.
Plymouth Plus can reveal that the council sent an email to hundreds of families without taking any steps to avoid the unlawful disclosure of their email addresses.
The email was sent by the Elective Home Education department containing guidance ahead of upcoming changes to legislation.
A human error in not using the blind copy function (BCC) led to the data breach, which has been reported to the Information Commissioner's Office.
The council has now apologised. A spokesperson for Plymouth City Council told Plymouth Plus:
“We regularly communicate with home-educating families via email to share helpful updates, including information on changes to legislation and available support.
“Unfortunately, due to human error, a recent email was sent to approximately 500 families without using the BCC function, meaning recipient email addresses were visible. As soon as we became aware of the issue, we contacted all recipients, advised them of the error, apologised and asked that they delete the email and refrain from using the details received”. It is important to note that no child data was included within the email, it was a general update for information only.
“In line with our corporate procedures, the incident was reported internally and an investigation was carried out. Following this, we contacted the recipients again to provide further information and reassurance. We are also implementing additional safeguards to prevent this happening again and have reported the incident to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) as a precautionary measure.
“We sincerely apologise for this mistake. We take our responsibilities around data protection extremely seriously, and incidents of this nature are very rare. If you are a recipient of the email, and would like to make a complaint, you can do so using the form available at https://www.plymouth.gov.uk/data-protection”
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