Hong Kong Independent Police Complaints Council (IPCC) said here Monday in a report that the negligence of a computer maintenance contractor led to the leak of information on 20,000 people who complained about police over the past decade.

The preliminary report, submitted to the council by a four-member investigation team, said the contractor who helped digitalize police complaints data failed to encrypt the files after uploading them to the Internet, thus enabling others to download such confidential records.

Hong Kong media reported on Friday that a database apparently from the IPCC revealed on the Internet highly confidential records dating back to 1996 about names, addresses and Hong Kong identity card numbers of 20,000 people who had complained about the police.

The contractor, who was contracted to digitalize the complaints data from 2003 to 2004, uploaded such files from a compact disc to a server on the Internet to make convenience for his work at home, according to the IPCC chairman Ronny Wong, who also headed the four-member investigation team.

A password was needed to read the data in the compact disc and the contractor took it for granted that downloading them from the Internet, Wong said.

"In other words, he forgot to set the password for reading such files saved an Internet server," Wong said, "this made others have easy access to such files without password protection."

Wong said he could not reveal the name of the contractor for the sake of further investigation.

According to the report, most of the leaked data were complaints filed against police before 2003 and most of complaints had been investigated before the leak incident.

The prime concern of the IPCC at the moment was to prevent such data from being misused, Wong said, adding the council had sought assistance from the Office of Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data and studying the necessity of applying an order of restrain from court to prevent the misuse.

Source: Xinhua