State employees are being told that some non-public information about them — their hometowns — was inadavertantly released to a Web site.
A request under the state Data Practices Act asked for names, salaries, job titles, agencies and “town of duty station” for all state employees — other than the judicial and legislative branches. All that information is public, so the information was provided to someone who posted it at an “Open Source Books” site.
But then officials realized that instead of “town of duty station,” the data base included employees’ hometowns, which is not considered public information. Specific addresses were not included.
The information was released Feb. 17 and posted on the Web site. Upon realizing the mistake, the file was removed from the Web site March 6 at the Minnesota Management and Budget department’s request.
Before the information was shut down, it was accessed fewer than a dozen times, officials said.
State officials say: “MMB takes its responsibility to protect private data very seriously and is re-evaluating current internal processes pertaining to data practices requests.”
In the meantime, and, said MMB spokesman Curt Yoakam: “A corrected document will be provided [to the original poster and] it is up to him if he would like to post again.”
