Councils across the Manchester area lost the personal details of thousands of people last year, including sending out data as a mistake when answering a Freedom of Information request. 

The report does not say how much data in total was lost but in one incident the data of 5,000 was lost.

The Manchester Evening News report: 

Councils across Greater Manchester lost data on thousands of people last year, we can reveal.

In one incident in May, the personal details of 5,000 housing applicants went missing after being sent out in the post by Manchester town hall.

However, the council said despite the CD containing ‘significant personal identifiers’, the data was protected by encryption software.

At Rochdale council, personal details including people’s names, addresses and dates of birth were mistakenly uploaded to a website.

You can read the full story here. 

I am a journalist and author. I am a journalist at the UK edition of WIRED magazine. In 2015, my first book Freedom of Information: A Practical Guide for UK Journalists, was published. My second book Reed Hastings: Building Netflix, was published in March 2020. I created FOI Directory in 2012 and have maintained it in my spare time ever since.