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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."
Yes, I am called Barack Obama. Can't you see that in these forge... authentic papers? I just travel economy, as that is the most cost-sensitive solution!
"Outlook not so good."
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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.
It was mostly only metadata.
personal information of the heads of state attending a G-20 summit [...] British Prime Minister David Cameron
A minor consitutional note, but David Cameron isn't a head of state. Queen Elizabeth is, but she doesn't have a passport, as they're issued in her name, and in any case she can just flash a tenner at passport control as ID, or just say "I'm the bloody queen, mate" and be done with it.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It's interesting for a couple of reasons. Given that the sender intended to send the details somewhere, I'd be really interested to know who the intended recipient was and for what reason.
Even more interesting, I never quite realised that heads of state would have (or then use), a passport. Surely no one actually checks it? I mean, I was once stuck in an immigration queue at JFK behind Paddy Ashdown, just after he stopped being something like the NATO-imposed governor of Bosnia and was an ordinary human again. He was relaxed, but his diminutive aide was not happy that Lord Ashdown had to wait. Fascinating people watching. But a proper bona-fide head of state?
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.
The only thing more annoying than a computer is a computer that tries to be helpful.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
Luckily the guy didn't email those world-leaders with all the recipients in the to: field, they would 'reply all' for the next 20 years and nothing would get done.