OpenSpending Data Breach (2013)

A freelance data specialist from our community recently got in touch to let us know that he had used OpenSpending to identify a number of privacy breaches in an individual dataset presented in OpenSpending. This was due to inconsistent redaction of sensitive data by the local authority. Whilst the majority of these payments were to organisations (hence probably not highly sensitive), there were also a few unredacted payments to individuals. The person who uploaded the data immediately notified their local council, who in turn referred this to their audit committee.