Radio New Zealand is reporting that personal tax data on 268,000 New Zealand taxpayers was provided to Facebook and Google without "encryption".
Earlier reports stated that the data was hashed to preserve anonymity.
Most people (including reporters) will be confused by these terms but remember:
A hash of a unique identifier is another unique identifier.
Hey, let me see if I understand it well... Using encryption would somehow have made it all better at all, then?
Well, I guess encryption may have prevented the data being purloined by third parties en route from IRD to Facebook, Google, and who knows who else.