There are many situations in academia where an entity is entrusted with confidential data belonging to a researcher. A very obvious one is the publication process: the journals are required to keep submitted papers confidential until they are published. But there are also other situations. For example, biologists can submit newly discovered nucleotide sequences to the EMBL database, and they have the option to request the new sequences to be kept confidential until publication. I guess that other disciplines can have similar arrangements.
In these cases, the entity has the responsibility of keeping the data confidential, and a leak can have highly negative consequences for the scientist who entrusted them with their not-yet-published results.
My question is: are there known cases of such leaks? I don't mean just a reviewer mentioning to his colleagues "I have a very interesting paper by X, if the results are confirmed, we may be looking at a cure for [type of cancer]" without further details. I mean high-profile cases where an institution or its employee is more or less "officially" accused of either willful wrongdoing, or of insufficient protection of the information so that e.g. a database was hacked and the information read out.
If there are such cases, what happened? How were they discovered, and what were the consequences for the scientist whose data was made public, and for the institution which should have kept it secret?
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