Insider says Manulife Bank didn't protect customers' highly private information for years | General financial discussion | Discussion forum

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/manulife-bank-customer-data-databarn-1.6787556

CBC News · Posted: Apr 03, 2023

"An insider says Manulife Bank of Canada stored customers’ private information — such as social insurance and credit card numbers — in a massive database with inadequate security protections for YEARS, potentially putting them at enormous risk.
A Manulife insider is blowing the whistle on what he says were major privacy issues within the company's Canadian banking division that have potentially put thousands of customers at risk.

Customers' bank account information and other personal details — millions of names, addresses, account details, social insurance and credit card numbers, birth dates and transactions among other things — could be widely seen in a database with few privacy protections in place — accessed by more than 100 employees and shared with an unknown number of others, he said.

"Anyone who's been a customer of Manulife bank … your data could have been taken by someone," he claimed in an interview with Go Public.

Go Public has also obtained an internal Manulife report written in the spring of 2021 that mirrors the insider's concerns. It documents data and privacy issues with that database, which at that point had existed for almost a decade.
But after upper management read the report, executives didn't want to fix the problem, says the insider, who was part of a group that sought solutions.
...
When Go Public asked whether the database met regulatory privacy requirements before concerns were outlined in the 2021 report, Manulife did not clarify"