The Cabinet Office has been fined £500,000 for disclosing postal addresses of the 2020 New Year Honours recipients online, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has confirmed.
The ICO found the Cabinet Office breached data protection law by publishing on 27 December 2019 a file on gov.uk with the names and unredacted addresses of more than 1,000 people in the list. On becoming aware, the Cabinet Office removed the weblink. However, the file was still cached and accessible online. The personal data was available for two hours 21 minutes and was accessed 3,872 times.
