Have I just breached privacy laws? I did not use the BCC email function!

In brief

In 2018, approximately 3000 individuals had their personal information compromised over a three month period due to a sender’s failure to use the ‘blind carbon copy’ (BCC) function when sending group emails.

What you need to know

• In 2018, six notifiable data breaches were reported to the  Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) over a three month period in relation to failing to use the BCC function when sending an email, with an average of 494 individuals affected in each breach.
• The breaches involved sending an email to a group by including all recipient email addresses in the ‘To’ field resulting in the inadvertent disclosure of all email addresses to all recipients.