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On September 31, 2003, the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner/Ontario (the IPC) received a telephone call from the Manager of the Freedom of Information and Privacy Office of the Ministry of Labour (the Ministry) regarding the theft of computers from one of the regional offices of the Office of the Worker Advisor (OWA). On October 6, 2003, a meeting was held at the IPC with the Manager of the Freedom of Information and Privacy Office (FOI), the Chief Administrative Officer of the Internal Administrative Services Division, and the Director of the Office of OWA. At this meeting, the Ministry confirmed that a series of break-ins occurred at the Scarborough OWA earlier in the year that resulted in the theft of several desktop computers.
On the basis of this information, the IPC initiated a privacy complaint under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (the Act).
Particulars Concerning the Incident
During the course of this investigation, the Ministry provided the IPC with the information outlined below.
During the weekend of April 21, 2003, two break-ins occurred at the Scarborough OWA Office. The first break-in occurred on April 21 and the second occurred on April 22. One desktop computer was stolen during each of these break-ins. A subsequent break-in occurred on May 2 wherein one more computer was stolen. The Police were notified and reports were filed immediately upon discovery of the break-ins. To-date, none of the stolen computers have been recovered by the Police. The OWA also notified MOL Facilities and Economics and Business Cluster Security. FOI and Issues Management Staff were consulted following the break-ins.
The Ministry advised that two of the three computers did not contain any personal information on the hard drives. One of the computers was used primarily for word processing and the user did not make it a practice to store any documents on the hard drive. The other computer was new and had not yet been used. However, one of the computers did have personal information stored on the hard drive relating to research and preparation of presentations on behalf of injured workers, including client names. The Ministry confirmed that all three computers were password protected with a unique password against access to the hard drives and that they were all turned off at the time of the thefts.
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