In this case, most of the documents were public, but there were a small number which had confidential information and were inappropriately stored on the public portal.

In the UK and most of Europe, you cannot request the personal information of anyone else via a freedom of information request, since it is likely to contain sensitive information to that person.

For the UK, you can find out more information about the specifics of this from the data protection act, which includes clauses about FOI requests.