Wrong man on paedophile list

Privacy Commissioner John Edwards has blasted the Sensible Sentencing Trust for having a ‘‘continuously negligent, cavalier, and dangerous approach to privacy’’.

The rebuke comes after the trust put a man’s picture on its offender database wrongly labelling him as a convicted paedophile. It was on the website for almost two years before the man was alerted.

‘‘A member of the public submitted the man’s photo, and a volunteer uploaded it ... without taking any steps to verify its accuracy,’’ Edwards said.

The trust said it did not know who submitted the photo, or who uploaded it.

It is not the first time the trust has been in trouble for a breach of privacy. In a settlement for a case in 2014, the trust agreed to provide the relevant personnel with privacy training.

The commissioner’s office said it understood the trust trained one person but that person left soon after.

In a rare move, the commissioner decided to identify the trust in the latest case, to warn the public of its ‘‘continuously negligent, cavalier, and dangerous approach to privacy’’.

The trust acknowledged a mistake was made and had taken its database down, saying it was checking all the records on it.

The commissioner found the trust had interfered with the man’s privacy – a finding that can only be made if harm has been done to the person involved.

The case note for the matter said the wrongly identified man made a ‘‘reasonable’’ request for financial compensation. The trust said it couldn’t pay that amount and offered significantly less.

Because of the significance of the case, and because it was not settled, the commissioner was referring it to the Director of Human Rights Proceedings.

The case note said there were 574 unique views of the item that included the man’s picture.

His first and last names were the same as that of the convicted paedophile but their middle names were different.

‘‘The man described how this incident humiliated him and his family ... When he was in public, he found himself looking away from people for fear someone would recognise him from the database. The man also described the difficulty he had in explaining the [trust’s] mistake to his friends, who thought they had been associating with a convicted paedophile.’’ The trust’s actions also caused him financial loss.

‘‘He had to take a lot of time out of running his business to try to fix this issue. The customer who alerted the man to the fact that his picture was in the database, also told the man they would no longer work with his business,’’ the note said.

‘‘Someone who saw the man’s picture in the database posted on the Facebook pages of schools and community groups calling the man a threat to children. It took a lot of effort for him to get these social media posts removed.’’

The trust’s failure to check the accuracy of its information implicated an innocent person for a terrible crime, tarnished his reputation, caused him emotional harm, and potentially put him at risk of violence.

‘‘The magnitude of this error calls the trust’s capabilities into question and raises concerns that the database may contain other significant errors,’’ Edwards said.

Trust spokesman Garth McVicar said the organisation ‘‘absolutely cocked up’’.

The trust was going to spend a ‘‘fair amount’’ on new software to run the database through a checking process, McVicar said.

As a not-for-profit organisation it didn’t have much money.

It had offered every cent in its account to the man.

The trust could be forced to close if the compensation it had to pay was more than it could afford.

‘‘The magnitude of this error calls the trust’s capabilities into question.’’ Privacy Commissioner John Edwards