The UK Supreme Court has upheld the employer's appeal is this well-known case. Readers will remember that it involved an senior IT internal auditor, Mr Skelton, at a supermarket who had been entrusted with passing on payroll information of just under 100,000 employees to an external auditor as part of the annual audit. After receiving a formal warning from the employer for the unauthorised use of postal services, the auditor held a grudge. He released the personal data of employees to a file-sharing website.

A group litigation claim was initiated by 5,518 employees/former employees who sued the supermarket for breach of the Data Protection Act 1998, misuse of private information and breach of confidence. It was argued that the