The file remained freely for eighteen months on the website of a provider of the Family Allowance Fund. The latter assures that he did not know that the data was linked to real beneficiaries.
by Louis Adam
A file containing the data of more than 10,000 beneficiaries of the Gironde Family Allowance Caisse (CAF) remained in free access to the Internet for eighteen months, as revealed The Radio France Investigation Cell , Thursday January 5. Transmitted in March 2021 by Gironde CAF to one of his providers, whose name was not revealed, these data – which corresponded to real beneficiaries – were intended to be used in exercises on statistical tools Aimed to CAF employees, but have been put online on the provider’s website, freely accessible to Internet users.
The file in question did not give the names and surnames of the persons concerned, but still contained many personal information: address, date of birth, income, amounts, or type of service received from CAF . According to Radio France, the dossier thus brought together 181 data points per recording, which makes their “disanonymization” extremely simple.
Open survey
The service provider withdrew the file from his site when this data leak was reported to him by the journalists. He nevertheless explains that he was not aware that the data he contained came from real beneficiaries of the Gironde CAF. The various exercises implemented by this Parisian provider do not require, in fact, not the use of real data, which explains, according to him, that the criminal file has not been processed with the necessary precautions in terms of protection of Personal data.