Cambridge Labour breaches personal data of 2,000 members
An email sent mistakenly by the regional party’s secretary has leaked the personal information of its 1,942 members
A data breach by the Cambridge Constituency Labour Party (CLP) has resulted in the names, postcodes, and phone numbers of nearly 2,000 Labour members being leaked via email, Varsity can reveal.
A list of 1,942 names and their personal information was attached to an email sent at 4:46 pm yesterday (11/01) to some members of the Cambridge CLP, which appears to be the details of the regional party’s membership.
The Secretary of the Cambridge CLP, Anne Campbell, has since apologised for the data breach, initially telling those who received the email: “The previous email with membership detail should not have been sent. Please delete from your system.”
Campbell sent another email to the CLP’s members this morning, writing that she has reported the breach to the party’s regional office, and to the central Labour Party’s IT team.
“I would like to apologise most sincerely to all those people whose data was revealed by the data breach yesterday,” Campbell wrote.
“My thanks go to the very many of you who emailed me to tell me that they had immediately deleted the files from their system,” the secretary also said.
Alongside the personal information of members, the breach of data also included the annual report of the Cambridge CLP, which stated the finances and assets of the party, alongside various other campaign documents.
It remains unclear how many email addresses received the data leak.
One Cambridge student who received the initial data breach email told Varsity: “I received an email, by mistake, containing personal information about the entire membership of the Cambridge CLP.”
“This is a pretty bad and basic data breach and, as a Labour Party member, does not reflect well on the competence of our CLP executive,” they said.
The Cambridge CLP has been contacted for comment.
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