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The Australian Privacy Commissioner has delivered a 50-50 verdict in his report on breaches of customer privacy in Vodafone’s computer system.

On the one hand, the allegation that data on “four million Vodafone customers including their billing and call records were uploaded onto a publicly accessible website” has been found to be unsubstantiated.

As Privacy Commissioner Tim Pilgrim states in his report, since “an organisation will not be disclosing information, where they are giving an individual access to information the organisation holds about them”, there was no breach of privacy according to National Privacy Principle (NPP) 2.1 (which covers the disclosure of personal information).

More seriously, however, the commissioner has decided that Vodafone’s security was not adequate to protect customer data according to another NPP. NPP 4.1 requires companies to protect personal information against misuse.

The commissioner singled out the use of shared logins for branded retailers’ stores as in breach of this principle. A single login for a store, instead of individual logins for each staff member, reduced the effectiveness of audit trails, the commissioner said, and exposed customer information to misuses such as identity fraud.

Vodafone has also undertaken to improve its security, reassess the level of access required by users, and end the use of shared logins.

As for login IDs, passwords and customer data – all of which, at some point in the story, were reported as being available “on the internet” – the Privacy Commissioner has said there was “no evidence that this information was available on the internet or Vodafone’s website”. ®

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