A hangover is one consiquence of a night of heavy booze but losing important personal information on an entire population is another.
If you think you are having a bad week, it is nothing compared to a man in Japan who lost a USB drive containing an entire city’s data after a night of drinking, BBC reported.
The unnamed man had transferred the personal details of every resident of the city of Amagasaki, northwest of Osaka, onto the drive Tuesday before going out with colleagues for post-work drinks, BBC said.
Amagasaki has 460,000 residents, according to The Guardian.
The man was hired as a private contractor to oversee Covid-19 relief payments to local households, The Guardian reported.
The man, who Japanese state TV NHK said was in his 40s, had one too many adult beverages and fell asleep on the street. When he woke up, the bag which had the important flash drive was gone, NHK reported.
The man works for a company tasked with providing benefits to tax-exempt households, and the USB drive had the names, birth dates, and addresses of all the city's residents. It also included more sensitive information, including tax details, bank account numbers and information on families receiving social security, BBC reported.
The embarrassing incident forced city officials to issue an apology.
"We deeply regret that we have profoundly harmed the public's trust in the administration of the city," an Amagasaki city official told a press conference.
Despite the blunder by the man, he might be in luck as city officials said the data on the missing USB drive is encrypted and locked with a password.
Officials also said that there has been no sign that anyone has attempted to access the information so far since it went missing, BBC reported.
