One of Sweden's largest insurance companies, Folksam, suffered a data breach, resulting in the personal information of approximately 1 million of its Swedish customers being leaked.
The company discovered the data breach after an internal audit, as revealed by Jens Wikström, head of marketing and sales at Folksam, and reported the incident to the Swedish Data Protection Authority, Datainspektionen.
As Wikström announced, “companies that have received personal data from Folksam are, for example, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Linkedin and Adobe. The purpose was, among other things, to analyze the information that customers and visitors to the website folksam.se searched for.”
The leaked data includes various types of information, such as social security numbers or information about customers' insurance
"This information is used by the tech giants to provide customers with tailored offers through Folksam's and other companies' communication channels," Wikström said.
This is something that should not have happened and we are now working hard to ensure that it does not happen again in the future. We are mapping out what personal data we share with our partners and how we share it. We are also working to ensure that we have routines and up-to-date agreements in place. – Jens Wikström
“Our goal was to analyze and offer our customers tailored offers, but unfortunately we haven’t done it the right way,” Wikström added
Upon discovering the leak, the company immediately stopped sharing the information and asked the companies that received data to delete it.
Folksam says there is no evidence at present that the sensitive data that was leaked has been used by third parties in an inappropriate manner.
Folksam is one of the largest investors in many major Swedish companies and is one of Sweden as an overseer of insurance assets worth $50 billion according to Bloomberg.
