Former GGD employee receives 240 hours of community service after searching corona systems

A GGD employee who removed the files of hundreds of Dutch people from the corona test systems and sold them online has been given a community service order of 240 hours and a suspended prison sentence of 120 days. The man took pictures of corona tests and sold them on Telegram.

The 19-year-old man from The Hague was already convicted in January, but the conviction has been only now made public. The man has confessed that, as an employee of the GGD, he looked into the CoronIT system between January and February of 2021. He looked up people’s files there and sold them to others for a euro each. He did this through apps like Telegram and Snapchat.

The man looked at the files of 795 Dutch people. It is unknown how much data he subsequently sold online. The Public Prosecution Service previously demanded an eight-month prison sentence against the man.

The court denounces not only the criminal offense of computer trespassing, but also the impact it had on society. “In a position in which the Defendant could have made a positive contribution to a very serious social situation, he has made the choice to let the pursuit of profit prevail over the integrity that was expected of him in fulfilling this position,” the court writes in the verdict. “The effect of the action goes beyond breaching the trust of the individuals whose data was taken. The case has also attracted publicity.”

At the beginning of 2021 it turned out from research by RTL Nieuws that data from the corona systems of the GGD was traded on a large scale on the internet and via chat apps. It concerned personal data that also showed someone’s result of a corona test. As a result of that news, the GGD had software replaced and the internal logging policy and control system tightened up.