Excel pivot table data leak leads to £120k fine for London council | Hacker News Reader

Excel pivot table data leak leads to £120k fine for London council

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30 pointswalshemj16 comments

It still bothers me that we as an industry completely botched the "productivity application" formats as thoroughly as we did.

For just about every other domain, we have a clear distinction between formats meant for editing vs publishing — You publish mp3 or aac, not Logic Pro files. You publish jpegs or pngs, rather than Photoshop files, etc.

Yet, for some reason, MS Office formats meant for editing became ubiquitous for distribution too. This incident is just the latest bit of nonsense that comes from this mistake.

For Word and Writer there are PDFs and unless you want my edits you should be sending PDFs rather than docs.

Is that a problem with the tech industry, or with businesses in general?

I would think that the only acceptable format for releasing information like this would be static - in this case, a PDF.

Even with PDF, there is a risk -- there have been some cases e.g. with the US government where sensitive info was thought to be redacted.

However, the people doing the "redaction" just added a black rectangle layer on top of the text, which was easily revertible.

E.g. https://washingtontechnology.com/articles/2009/12/09/tsa-bre...

But the format is not what distinguishes the process. Its the application software. We already have a separation there. There are .DOC file viewers, or image file viewers, and mp3 file players, in addition to having software that can edit all of those.

html/js/css was used as both an authoring format and distribution format, at least until recently - minification, compile-to-js, webpack etc. - and those latter are often regarded as a regression in this context (breaks "view source", etc.)

First, it seems silly to fine a government since that's really just tax payer money. Secondly, are owners of properties not public record already in the UK? They are in the US (even if that company is just a shell that's hard to figure out the real owner of)

Ownership is recorded publicly at the Land Registry. This table was a list of vacant properties and their owners, which is potentially far more sensitive.

There's some data available from the Land Registry[0] but the data leaked seems to include the addresses of people who own vacant property (so a different address to the property itself), which I would not expect to be freely available.

[0]http://landregistry.data.gov.uk

As well as other things people have mentioned, it's more complicated than that. The Land Registry doesn't cover the whole UK - just England and Wales - and only about 85% of property. It registers mostly transfers by sale, or long-term leases, but not eg inheritance. So family farms, large estates, etc are not in there. In Scotland the information is held by the Registers of Scotland, and in Northern Ireland it's Land and Property Services - neither of whom provide free access.

Interesting.

I metal detect as a hobby, and often need to determine ownership for places I want to ask permission to search.

In the US, everywhere I've ever checked has ownership information publicly available. Most counties and municipalities have a GIS site of some kind that lets you look up ownership on an interactive map; the most difficult case would be that you'd have to call the assessor's office and ask someone to look up the owner of a given parcel. I may be mistaken, but I believe even in that case they're required to make those data available in electronic form upon request.

As for privacy, the most common thing I've seen is that people will create an LLC or a trust that owns the property. In those cases the entity's name is tied to the record and the contact information is that of its registered agent. That's almost always a local attorney. Every time I've called them and asked I've been given the name and contact information of the person behind the entity, but at least in theory the attorney could serve as a proxy. Legal entities can make things complicated, but I don't know of any way to actually completely hide ownership if someone wanted to go through the trouble of tracing the chain of holding entities.

A simple procedure to prevent the leakage of the data is to copy values only when you copy/paste anything in Excel. It's a special option you have to select, but when done properly it erases all of the hidden information that's used to calculate a value and replaces it with the displayed value in the cell.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/paste-values-not-fo...

Another good way would be to export the data as a CSV file and then double check that before releasing it.

> It's a special option you have to select, but when done properly […]

So not really reliable, I wouldn't trust ordinary office users to use it correctly. Exporting to CSV is safer, because you can open the file in a plain-text editor and see what you're actually going to share. CSV won't hide anything from you, unlike the proprietary Excel file format (I know it's XML-in-ZIP but who can be bothered inspecting the contents).

Why is it not reliable? The much famed "ordinary" user is often portrayed a bumbling incompetent user. For any heavy excel user, or rather any excel user thats ever used formulas, this is a common UI operation. Your CSV suggestion is good, but it can't carry the formatting and other extra info which is the reason people use excel to begin with!

No it's not because you never know what other data is quietly hidden somewhere else in that monstrous opaque file. MS Word used to silently include deleted text to help it save/open files faster! You really need to look at all the bytes in the file to be sure, which means export to CSV, or I suppose unzip the XLSX file and hope there's no binary data. The same goes for metadata in images, and any other complicated opaque file format. It's automatically potentially full of things you don't know about unless you're an expert on that particular format and software, which no government Excel user is.

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