Company Fined for Private Data Leak
The Tallinn database management company Andmevara was fined 3,000 euros by the Data Protection Inspectorate for the potential leak of 126,379 people's personal data in February.
Capital residents who had applied for land tax exemption had their names, ID numbers, living addresses, property sizes and the amount of the tax exception given for their properties revealed, reported uudised.err.ee.
The data was not directly available since the inquirer had to know a person's name for the query. Upon an inquiry the system would show the private data of the two persons who preceded and followed the inquired person. Andmevara claimed unforeseen technical circumstances as a reason for the fault.
The agency said 300 requests were made during the course of the five days. After finding out about the issue, the company quickly removed the problematic documents and requested Google to clear their cache, resolving the issue on the same day it occurred.
The Data Protection Inspectorate noted Andmevara's fast response time in resolving the issue.