Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie – the man who lifted the lid on the Facebook data scandal – might want to take a closer look at his current employers, too, after H&M has admitted to its own embarrassing data leak.
It appears the Swedish retailer, which made a big fanfare last year of appointing Wylie to boost its use of AI and data analytics, has inadvertently leaked the highly confidential data of hundreds of employees working in the company’s customer centre in Nuremberg, Germany.
The information was gathered from personnel interviews between employees and managers, and included health data and details about employees’ private lives.
The confidential files should only have been accessible by managers, but, it seems, other H&M staff could also access them too.
According to one media report the October breach affected “several hundred” employees, but the company insists the files were deleted as soon as the incident was discovered.
Commenting publicly for the first time on the issue, H&M said: “The local team has taken a range of action and is in close dialogue with all colleagues. Since the incident is in legal examination … we cannot further comment at the moment.”
Hamburg State Data Protection Commissioner Johannes Caspar has reportedly launched a probe into the incident. It is not known whether Wylie, who has been in huge demand since the Facebook scandal first broke, will be sticking his oar in too.
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