The Nationalist Party will take a potentially grave data breach of its paid-up members (tesserati) for a MaltaToday survey to the Data Protection Commissioner and trigger an investigation.

Speaking to Lovin Malta, PN Deputy Leader for Party Affairs Robert Arrigo confirmed that he will meet with the commissioner soon and will also take the issue up within the party’s ethics committee.

On Sunday, MaltaToday published a survey among tesserati which gauged the popularity of PN leader Adrian Delia and leader candidate Bernard Grech ahead of this summer’s leadership election.

It found that Grech vastly outperformed Delia in every cohort of PN voter, no matter their residence, age, gender or level of education.

MaltaToday confirmed that the survey was only possible after they were handed “an anonymised PN membership list that had contact numbers and the locality of residence”.

Arrigo would not be drawn into specifics as to who leaked the list, but insisted that the leader and deputy leaders do not have access to the list.

The issue was first raised by Angelito Scibberas, the former Director of the Nationalist Party’s Electoral Commission and former Assitant Secretary-General.

“Anonymisation – the process of either encrypting or removing personally identifiable information from data sets so that the people whom the data describe remain permanently anonymous.”

“Contact numbers identify the data subjects. It even associates that the same data subjects are politically affiliated. The ‘leaked’ list does not qualify as anonymised,” he said.

He warned MaltaToday is sitting on a breach of Special Category data and said the person who leaked it should be ashamed of themselves.

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