It is all over the news, possible breaches of Alberta’s provincial Health Information Act (HIA). But who is doing the alleged breaching? Most recently, a couple Members of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta and a former City of Edmonton employee.
Let’s talk about MLA Thomas Dang, who currently sits as an independent member representing Edmonton-South. On November 4, 2022, he was handed a $7,200 fine after pleading guilty to a charge of illegally attempting to access private information. He admitted to hacking the province’s COVID-19 vaccine records portal using his computer.
Back in 2020, Tyler Shandro Alberta’s former Health Minister, became subject of two privacy breach complaints in just one month. The first of his complaints came from Dr. John Julyan-Gudgeon who filed a complaint with the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (OIPC) after Alberta Health Services provided his personal cell number to Shandro. Shandro then used the number to call Dr. Julyan-Gudgeon at home, at night. The second complaint against Shandro comes after Shandro’s political staff accessed and released billing information from an Edmonton clinic to rebut allegations made during an NDP news conference. When the OIPC receives complaints, they go through the normal process of determining whether an investigation is warranted, which takes a while.
On November 30, 2022, it became public that a former employee of the City of Edmonton accessed the personal information of more than 5000 employees in a data breach in May 2021 when he downloaded documents from city-owned computers onto a personal cloud-based account. The records include employee names and payroll numbers. Other files included management information, seniority lists and recall information for employees who were temporarily laid off.
The City of Edmonton recommends those who worked for them between 2018 and May 2021 who have questions about their privacy related to this incident to reach out to the office of the city clerk at 780-496-1551.
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