Wrong stapled Postbank:-customer receives foreign credit data

An unpleasant Surprise experienced by a customer of the Postbank. The man from Duisburg took place at the beginning of July data about a credit contract of any other Postbank customers in his letter box. "A pretty penny", he was surprised, no trivial matter so. As reported to the F. A. Z., was the occasion of writing an updated repayment schedule, the city of Duisburg, in the following a special redemption of his own consumer credit had been given.

Mark Fehr

editor in the economy.

it's just a pity that in the letter, sensitive data on the credit agreement of Postbank customers from a large city in southern Germany, the approach only a little and never to a stranger would have sent found may be. What is remarkable about the case is that such errors occur, after all, no one is infallible. Sobering, however, is that the involuntary addressee felt at first from the Bank rather let down. Him by the question, especially if their credit data might also be in foreign letter boxes landed.

isolated incident

it Is "only" the mistake of a Bank employee when the manual delivery of customer post or even to a systematic error in automatic delivery of the updated credit balances? The latter was fortunately the case, as it turns out. According to Postbank, it was simply the fact that a member of staff from the Department of accounting had stapled two Write to each other, belonged together. This should happen according to the Postbank in any case. It had been a single incident so that no other customers were affected. The protection of customer data enjoy the highest priority.

As a speaker informs in addition, kuvertiere the Postbank, the majority of the customers write machine, but in some cases also manually. Thus, cannot be categorically does not "exclude the possibility of an operation being conducted by a human or machine failures process compliant". If this occurs nevertheless, check the Postbank, of course, whether a notification to the data protection Inspectorate is required, or whether, in addition, affected customers should be informed. Automatic delivery of customer post of confusion on a larger scale, such as most recently the example of the Commerzbank showed. Many of their customers in North Rhine-Westphalia had received in the April Post with a foreign account data. Basic a programming error in a printing plant in Düsseldorf.

on The first attempt "abgebügelt"

The Postbank customer from Duisburg had reported after the incident, first spontaneously under a Central number of the Postbank, as he told this newspaper. There, he felt pretty "abgebügelt" with the apparently spontaneous statement, the Computer was to blame. The Postbank has brought the incident to the responsible external reviewers of the call in the meantime to the language. This was also due to the fact that the customer took the second attempt and the E-Mail address of the privacy Department a little more lucky.

Their findings: Because of the Duisburg customer acted responsibly and interested in was to bring light into the darkness, the Postbank is no risk of a data breach. Therefore, it is not necessary to inform the southern German customer that a Stranger has involuntarily given an insight into his data. Our responsibility in Duisburg, however, is different. For him, it is a question of Fairness, the süddeutsche Zeitung to write and inform him about the incident. After all, for a contact recording the necessary data he has now, Yes.