Conservatives face legal investigation over by-election campaign
Written by Mark Pack on 21st May 2008 – 10:46 pmOops indeed as the BBC reports:
The Information Commissioner is launching an investigation after the Conservatives accidentally sent details of 8,000 people to a radio station.
The e-mail sent contained the names, addresses, telephone numbers and intentions of voters in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election.
Deputy Information Commissioner David Smith said the disclosure, to Manx Radio, raised “serious concern”.
The Conservatives admitted a “mistake” had been made.
The information, which had been gathered by the Tories during the campaign for Thursday’s by-election, was contained in three Excel files, and was sent in an e-mail to Manx Radio by accident, potentially breaching data protection laws.
Posted in Crewe and Nantwich, Opposition watch
21st May 2008 at 11:14 pm
Oh dear - was it sent from Grant Schnapps e-mail address?
Only 8,000 contacts in a by-election - no wonder the Tories ‘don’t get’ by-elections…
21st May 2008 at 11:18 pm
And all those Conservative voters who tell me `it’s between me and the ballot box`!
22nd May 2008 at 9:14 am
Are all Lib Dems nationwide totally sure their own systems are robust enough to avoid the risk of such lapses?
22nd May 2008 at 9:25 am
Sounds like a genuine mistake to me, of the sort that could happen to any party.
This sort of information gets passed around by email internally on occasion and it’s not difficult for the wrong email address to be put in (especially with auto-complete and the like).
22nd May 2008 at 10:02 am
Actually, the Lib Dems systems are robust in so far as all such information is produced by unique software and held in a format not generally or publically available, not in Microsoft Excel. Should a LD file go astray, I’m sure some genius, somewhere, could ‘crack it’, but why would they?
22nd May 2008 at 11:14 am
I wouldn’t want anyone discovering our special formula for sticking double sided tape onto posters.
Seriously though, it’s a genuine mistake which could happen to anyone.
22nd May 2008 at 11:55 am
@Martin Land. The Lib Dem system, as standard, exports data in comma-separated value (csv) format which is perfectly readable by Excel.
And as for why they would crack it: because they want the data for some reason (why bother having the regulations in the first place if no-one’s interested in the data).
We shouldn’t hide behind proprietary file formats: I certainly wouldn’t accept that excuse from some Government department that lost my personal details.
It could happen to us just as easily as anyone else so, like everyone else, we need to take care.
22nd May 2008 at 2:24 pm
I dont think we can get too holy about this. We do from time to time send as atachments to mail files containing voter data. These could be EXCEL files or even .pdf files.
The misdirected Tory file sounds like it was a ‘Target List’for a phone canvassing operation. Just the sort of thing a central committee room might send out to a distant action centre.
I have long mused that we should accept the campaign discipline of only sending election-sensitive materials over the INTERNET if they are encrypted using PGP. That’s the ‘Pretty Good Privacy’ utility if you don’t know the net jargon.
Maybe ALDC could look into proceedures and training for this?