The Government acknowledges that thousands of personal data were leaked by mistake in the grants process.

BarcelonaThe Catalan government has acknowledged that 6,771 personal data records were mistakenly leaked from the grant database of a website belonging to the Ministry of Economy and Finance. As reported by TV3 and confirmed by ARA with sources within the department, this leak also explains the initial service outage and subsequent sudden disappearance of one million Generalitat grant records—an incident that caused considerable uproar and a wave of speculation. The leak came to light following the widespread use of Subvencions.cat, a public aid search engine created by Gerard Giménez, which used Generalitat data. Suddenly, records began disappearing from the site overnight. The executive generically pointed to "a technical problem", without specifying.

Sources within the Ministry of Economy report that on March 10th, it was discovered that data from the Catalan Registry of Aid and Subsidies "included personal information of beneficiaries." The Catalan government (Generalitat) then suspended the service upon detecting the issue, as the data contained information that was later determined to be personal. "Only the data from local entities" sent by the National Database of Subsidies was affected, according to government sources, while "no general impact was detected on the Generalitat's data." The Generalitat's subsidy data could be accessed "normally" the day after the incident, with "the same information," after it was "verified that all confidential data was properly protected" thanks to the existing "controls." Meanwhile, data from local entities could be viewed in the national database.

The issue is that the "incident" affected approximately 7,000 beneficiaries because "some data from local authorities bypassed the anonymization filters," specifically data that did not use a national identity card (DNI) or foreign resident identification number (NIE), such as passports. According to department sources, to prevent this incident from recurring, "the entire control format is being changed and adapted to new filters," and this process has already been communicated to the Catalan Data Protection Authority, which, as reported by TV3, has already launched an investigation. The government confirms that this body was "promptly" informed of the incident. In this regard, they insist that they are working "to resolve the issue with the local authority data as soon as possible," in line with their initial statement, and reiterate that local subsidies can be viewed in the state database. Furthermore,