Tread carefully when perusing leaked Ashley Madison data, Hong Kong privacy watchdog warns
It may be fine to browse or share a link to the leaked data from infidelity dating site Ashley Madison, but people who identify individuals’ information and encourage others to look at it may have breached data protection rules, Hong Kong’s privacy watchdog says.
Hackers who breached the servers of the site have dumped details of around 37 million accounts online, including thousands of email addresses ending in “.hk”, indicating they are local. But it is unclear how many were genuinely used by the email address holders and how many are still paying customers.
READ MORE: Forget Ashley Madison, the real hack is making us dependent and powerless
The leaked data from the dating website for those looking to have an affair includes street addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, gender, weight and height, ethnicity, occupation and so on.
The watchdog said it would monitor the matter but it had received no complaints regarding the hacking so far.
“Our legal opinion is if netizens simply share the link to the hacked data, they might not have a problem,” Chang said.
“But if they dig out data identifiable of a particular person, say an email address used by someone at the company he works for, and they post it online and ask others to look at the database, they will have probably breached data protection principle 3,” he added.
That principle says personal data must be used for the purpose for which the data is collected, unless the data subject gives explicit consent to use for a new purpose.
Non-compliance with the principle does not constitute a criminal offence directly, but once the watchdog issues an enforcement notice, contravention could result in a maximum fine of HK$50,000 and two years in jail.
