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Vodafone's woes worsen with new data-access accusation

Operator trawled a MONTH worth of texts to hunt whistleblower

Vodafone Australia's data access scandal has escalated towards blood-in-the-boardroom levels, with accusations that its abuse of a journalist's data in 2011 went on longer than the company has admitted.

The saga began in 2011, when Sydney Morning Herald journalist Natalie O'Brien revealed serious privacy shortcomings in the company's Siebel rollout giving retail stores excessive access to customer information.

Earlier this month, it emerged that someone had accessed O'Brien's call records and texts in a search for the whistleblower.

Originally the company blamed a “rogue employee” and denied wrongdoing, but last Tuesday it reported the matter to the Australian Federal Police, NSW Police, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, and the Privacy Commissioner.

The Sydney Morning Herald has now lifted the accusations another notch, saying O'Brien's records for a whole month were trawled to try and identify her source.

That data was sucked out of the company's systems and downloaded to some kind of external hard drive (the SMH has a rather garbled understanding of the technical detail here), and a spreadsheet containing the data was sent to KPMG which was working with the company to “investigate other activities”.

Vodafone has not yet responded to the accusations. ®

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