Two laptops containing 3.7 million personal information of Hong Kong voters were stolen. The theft was first reported by Hong Kong's Registration and Electoral Office (REO) on March 27th, 2017.
The laptops were stored in a locked room at AsiaWorld-Expo in Lantau, a designated backup site for the chief executive election. According to Hong Kong media, the data that has been stolen include the names, addresses and identity card numbers of all registered voters in the city.
Moments after realizing the laptops went missing, the police have launched a "routine investigation" into the matter given the huge amount of personal data involved.
The Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Bureau has instructed the REO to fully cooperate with police investigations, the REO said in a statement.
Hong Kong's Registration and Electoral Office only said that the number of personal data involved is "considerable" without revealing how many voters were really affected. In a statement, REO said that the loss of the devices "may lead to personal information leakage", but stressed out that the data had been encrypted.
Besides the data of voters, The REO said the devices also contained the full names of the 1,194 Election Committee members who voted in the election.
The data breach has drawn criticism from lawmakers and Hong Kong citizens. "This is unacceptable," wrote Charles Mok, a lawmaker representing the city's IT sector. "There's no reason why the data was stored on computers that could have been stolen; they could have encrypted it on the cloud."
Since Hong Kong's separation from British rule in 1997, the city has designated a pre-selected group of voters from its business and political establishment to represent the population. And this moment is marked as one of the most significant data breaches in the city's history.
