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Oops: World Leaders' Personal Data Mistakenly Released By Autofill Error
mpicpp writes in with this story about a mistake that saw personal details of world leaders accidentally disclosed by the Australian immigration department. "With a single key stroke, the personal information of President Obama and 30 other world leaders was mistakenly released by an official with Australia's immigration office. Passport numbers, dates of birth, and other personal information of the heads of state attending a G-20 summit in Brisbane, Australia, were inadvertently emailed to one of the organizers of January's Asian Cup football tournament, according to The Guardian. The U.K. newspaper obtained the information as a result of an Australia Freedom of Information request. Aside from President Obama, leaders whose data were released include Russian President Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Chinese President Xi Jinping and British Prime Minister David Cameron. The sender forgot to check the auto-fill function in the email 'To' field in Microsoft Outlook before hitting send, the BBC reports."
Amusing as this is, most of it (perhaps not passport numbers -- but how hard can it be to get a new passport as a head of state) is already public information.
There is absolutely nothing that could happen to any of these people that would make me feel like something unfair was done to them, or feel bad for them in any way whatsoever. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Sadly though the biggest argument against the concept of karma is a very strong one: in this world, the wicked tend to prosper.
When their privacy is violated, it makes headlines.
When they violate ours, it's business as usual.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
OK, so the summary makes it sound like the Guardian got a copy of the personal information via a FOI request, which would make no sense. "Welp, we sent it in an email. Guess we have to release it now if anyone asks." In fact what happened is they learned about the breach through a FOI request, though I'm not sure how they knew to make the request.
Oh ya, because we know he was born on Mars and he's been denying it all his life. Denial is the best evidence of a lie. The whole Kenya thing is just a smokescreen to entrap the ignorant who don't know the Mars story.
All autocompletes I have ever seen are completely awful and generally worse than nothing at all. Putting words together is, like, the one thing we humans are good at? So I am at a loss as to why we seem so addicted to this ridiculous kind of software.
Really? I use it all the time -- works really well on Google Mail, I start typing "Joh" and a popup window gives me a list of users that begin with "Joh" so I can choose whether I wanted to send the email to John or Johanna. Works decently well on my phone too - I use the "swipe" style typing on my phone and the autocomplete usually figures out the word I meant to type, even when I don't quite swipe over all of the letters I intended to type.
Forget the auto-complete nonsense. The question that should be being asked is why an un-encrypted email containing " Passport numbers, dates of birth, and other personal information of the heads of state attending a G-20 summit in Brisbane, Australia" would be being sent to ANYONE. I can't even send an unencrypted email at work containing MY OWN social security number.
The idea of state-sanctioned royalty in 2015 is quite disturbing.