H&M's data leak in Germany "in legal examination"

New York - Fashion retailer H&M (HMb.ST) said on Saturday that data security breaches found at its German unit were unacceptable and it was cooperating with the local data protection supervisory authority in its investigation into the matter.

“The local team has taken a range of action and is in close dialogue with all colleagues”, an H&M spokeswoman said in a statement. “Since the incident is in legal examination ... we cannot further comment on that at the moment,” she further said in a statement published by Reuters over the weekend.

In October last year, the ‘Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung‘ reported that personal data of H&M employees working in one of the group’s centres in Germany were leaked to other H&M employees who should not have access to this kind of data. The employees affected by this data leak were informed by the board of H&M on Wednesday October, 23. On the following day the board announced, that all stored in the files, was deleted and that measures were taken to ensure data security. Additionally, the data protection officer of H&M in Nuremberg as well as the competent data protection authority were notified about the data incident.

It’s worth recalling that earlier this month, the German daily ‘Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’ reported that the State Data Protection Commissioner in Hamburg, Johannes Caspar, had started a probe into H&M management on unlawfully sounding out workers about their personal life and storing the details.

“The qualitative and quantitative extent of the employee data accessible to the entire management level of the company shows a comprehensive research of the employees, which is without comparison in recent years,” Caspar was quoted saying by the paper.