More than 10,000 beneficiaries of a local branch of the French social security agency CAF, or Family Allowance Fund, saw their data exposed for about 18 months, after a file containing personal information was sent to a service provider.
The mistake, discovered by France Info — Radio France’s news and investigation service — just before the year-end holidays, could hit the CAF hard. The investigation found that the CAF in Gironde (Nouvelle-Aquitaine) sent a file containing sensitive and personal information of 10,204 beneficiaries to a service provider responsible for training the organization’s statisticians.
The provider denies having asked to work with real information, and the Gironde CAF apparently failed to specify that the data that was sent included information on current benefit recipients.
For the transmission of the file, beneficiary surnames and first names were removed as well as their postal codes, but a lot of other information remained: address (number and street name), date of birth, household composition and income, amounts and types of benefits received (disabled adult allowance, etc.), according to the France Info inquiry.
