Interior Ministry to launch internal inquiry into personal data leak
The Ministry of the Interior is planning to carry out an internal inquiry to ascertain whether there has been a breach of privacy laws that allowed a candidate for the ruling conservative party in the upcoming European parliamentary elections to send hundreds of Greeks abroad campaign material to their private email accounts.
“We will not allow any shadows in this matter,” Interior Minister Niki Kerameus told state broadcaster ERT on Tuesday, announcing the probe, which would seek to investigate whether her ministry was in any way involved in giving Anna-Michelle Asimakopoulou, an MEP with ruling New Democracy, voters’ private email addresses without their consent, as required by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.
“Our goal is to ascertain and confirm the adequacy of the security of personal data protection processes,” she said, after opposition parties on Monday called for answers from the ministry on the affair.
Dismissing privacy concerns expressed by the opposition and other quarters about the government’s recently introduced voting system for Greeks living abroad, which will be tested for the first time in the Euro elections in June, Kerameus said that the issue has “nothing to do with the postal vote.”
“It concerns the adequacy of data security for the voter rolls of 2023,” she claimed.
The breach was revealed on Friday after hundreds of Greeks living abroad took to social media to complain about receiving unsolicited emails from Asimakopoulou’s campaign.
The Interior Ministry issued a brief statement denying that it provided the information after the MEP had suggested in an interview that she got the information from the ministry’s electoral registers.
Greece’s privacy watchdog is also conducting an investigation into the affair.
