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

Re:Excel pivot table data leak leads to £120k fine for Londo... by pdpi on Monday April 23, 2018 @02:02PM (#16905823)

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.

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Re:Excel pivot table data leak leads to £120k fine for Londo... by mafagafogigante on Monday April 23, 2018 @02:22PM (#16906019)

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

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Re:Excel pivot table data leak leads to £120k fine for Londo... by ksk on Monday April 23, 2018 @02:46PM (#16906262)

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.

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Re:Excel pivot table data leak leads to £120k fine for Londo... by LyndsySimon on Monday April 23, 2018 @02:44PM (#16906247)

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.

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Re:Excel pivot table data leak leads to £120k fine for Londo... by United857 on Monday April 23, 2018 @03:10PM (#16906444)

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...

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Re:Excel pivot table data leak leads to £120k fine for Londo... by contextfree on Monday April 23, 2018 @07:30PM (#16908412)

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.)

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