In July 2022, vaccination data for around 800 Swedish children under 12 who had been vaccinated against Covid-19 appeared on a website. The Swedish health authority then initiated investigations and, based on new findings, now assumes that the entire Swedish vaccination register may have been disclosed. The Swedish public prosecutor's office has now brought charges against an external IT consultant for the health department. He is said to have violated his duty of confidentiality and intentionally disclosed personal data that he was obliged to keep secret.
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Possibly 7 million vaccinated people affected
According to the health authority, the potentially leaked data includes, for example, the social security number, information about the vaccination administered and the email address. So far, however, there is no evidence that the data was distributed, but this cannot be ruled out.
The vaccination register contains information on around seven million vaccinated people, a large part of the population (10.5 million, as of 2023). According to its own information, the health authority has taken further measures to “tighten security routines, among other things for externally hired people”. A new report has also been submitted to the Swedish Data Protection Authority (Integritetsskyddsmyndigheten).
“We take the incident very seriously and have taken a number of measures to further increase security. You should be confident that your personal data will be treated securely,” says the Ministry of Health's chief legal officer, Bitte Bråstad.
There has been talk of a suspected data leak in India since June 2023, in which vaccination data is also said to have been leaked. There, the Indian government was investigating a data leak from the vaccination portal CoWin, which contains data from around one billion of the local population.
(mack)