Can I tell the press?

[emmalinewre]

A hospital has recently emailed me as I signed up to be part of their study.
In the email, they had accidentally attached a large document which has full names and test details for seemingly all other participants in the study.
They have since sent an email stating they are 'recalling' their previous email and to please delete it. It states that ii) do not disclose, copy or distribute information in this e-mail or take any action in relation to its content (to do so is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful).

I feel like I should pass this onto the press, as its a huge breach of data.

Should I? Can I?
Could they sue me or something if I did?

They have realised their error.

What do you want to achieve going to the press?

Address them directly, share your concerns and ask them what they are going to do in the future to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

Why would you go the press rather than ensuring the data breach has been reported correctly to ICO?

That's a really weird reaction.

Why go to the press? What exactly do you want to gain?

Why do you want to do that?

Check they have reported themselves to the ICO and move on.

That's shoddy but the relevant regulatory body is the ICO not the Daily Mail

Why on earth would you do that?!

They will probably have already informed the ICO.

What are you looking to achieve? Your 5 minutes of fame 🤔

Why would you want to go to the press?

It is pretty poor that they have breached the data but errors of this nature occur surprisingly frequently. Depending on the number of data subjects involved and the types of data that have been breached, they will probably need to have reported themselves to the ICO, but this will depend on their assessment of the risks arising from the breach.

Most people would just comply with the request to delete the data. What do you think going to the press will actually achieve?

It would be better to ask them what process changes they will be implementing to avoid similar breaches occurring in the future.

If you don't think they've reported them selves then report them to the ICO. I imagine if its a big enough breach they'll make it public.

If you are desperate for cash by all means go to the daily fail and see if they are interested but karma will bite you.

Why would you do that unless they were taking no action to correct this /prevent similar errors?

The press? What a really bizarre flex

Go to the press for what exactly? Are you hoping they’ll pay you? Get a life

I concur with everyone else, report it to the ICO. Reporting to the press just makes me think you want your five minutes of fame a to do a Daily Mail sad face.

Well, if you wanted to be a complete knob, then you could, of course. Are you practising your Daily Mail sad face and hoping for compensation for your trauma?

This ^
What do you hope to achieve by going to the ‘press’?

What do you think the press will do .

So OP why would you suggest the press? What's your angle? Just delete the email and move on.

Why? For the snitch factor?

This isn’t “the hospital” this is some poor person who has made a bad mistake and now probably can’t sleep for fear that someone will choose to make their life hell. Apparently, that person is you.

I know... I'm so outraged that a human being has made an error leading to a massive and potentially traumatic data breach that instead of checking they have reported it appropriately I'll breach it myself intentionally with the press who might give me a few quid. Is that really what you're asking OP?

This sums up what I was thinking.
Thank you

Announcing to the Press has an additional side effect - it notifies people that this data is out there and could potentially be valuable in some way, creating a market/demand for somebody else to flog it.

Notify the ICO and have done with it.

If you look on the “action we’ve taken” page of the ICO website you’ll see that even just on the first page or two there are various beaches from police forces, the MOD, the CPS, hospitals and schools to name a few 🤷🏼‍♀️ this is not as scandalous or as rare as you seem to think OP so the chances of the papers frothing at the mouth for this boring story are pretty slim. Maybe the newspaper from Afterlife would be interested???