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A few keystrokes can be enough to send personal information to the wrong person. In Serguey Shinder’s account of incidents at his organization, 27 of 34 personal-data incidents involved email sent to the wrong recipient after someone accepted an autocomplete suggestion. That is one organization’s experience—not a ranking of breach causes across all organizations—but it shows how an ordinary address-selection mistake can become a privacy incident without any attacker.
How a name autocomplete mistake became a data breach
Email apps often suggest contacts as a sender types in the To or Cc field. If two people have similar names, or an old external address remains in suggestions, a sender can select the wrong contact before noticing. Verizon’s earlier explanation of misdelivery describes this kind of autocomplete error as sensitive information going to an unintended recipient; it also notes that mass-mailing content can be mismatched with recipients. Verizon’s sector analysis explains the mechanism, not its current prevalence.
In Shinder’s account, the consequences ranged from a disciplinary letter sent to a similarly named external contact to a customer statement sent to a competitor. In another incident, a spreadsheet containing workers’ home addresses went to an external list. The common thread was not sophisticated hacking: the message reached a real but incorrect recipient.
What the incident numbers do—and do not—show
Shinder says his organization recorded 34 personal-data incidents in the preceding year. He reports that 32 involved email sent to the wrong person, and 27 of those involved accepting a suggested recipient after typing the first few letters of a name. He also says three incidents were reportable. The account does not clearly identify the year covered by these counts or provide an audit or detailed methodology, so they should be read as his organization’s reported experience, not as independently verified statistics or a general rate.
#1 Best Overall
Broader data offers context, but it has a different denominator. Verizon Business’s 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report says misdelivery accounted for more than 50% of errors in its 2023 dataset, and that end users were attributed 87% of those errors. These figures describe errors in Verizon’s dataset—not all breaches everywhere, nor all employee behavior. The report’s summary for miscellaneous errors lists 2,679 incidents, with confirmed data disclosure in 2,671; those are counts for the report’s pattern, not a worldwide incident total. Verizon’s 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report provides the dataset context.
Controls that can make misdelivery less likely
No single safeguard fits every email system or workflow. The controls Shinder says his organization adopted address different points in the process: reducing the chance of choosing a wrong address, creating time to catch an error, and limiting exposure if a document is sent incorrectly.
Reduce risky suggestions and confirm external recipients
Review how the mail system remembers and displays contacts, especially external addresses. Shinder says his organization removed remembered external suggestions and added a confirmation step when a message had both an external recipient and an attachment. A confirmation prompt is most useful when it draws attention to a consequential choice rather than becoming a routine click-through.
Add a brief sending delay
A short hold before outgoing mail leaves gives a sender a chance to notice a wrong recipient and stop the message. Shinder’s organization introduced a 60-second outgoing-mail hold. A delay can help only if the sender has a clear way to recall or cancel a message during that window, and it may add friction to time-sensitive communication.
Move especially sensitive documents behind sign-in
For highly sensitive records, sending a notification with a link to an authenticated portal can limit exposure compared with attaching the full document to an email. Shinder says his organization moved sensitive HR and credit-control documents to sign-in portals. Access controls still need to be configured for the intended recipient; a portal does not make a misaddressed notification harmless if it grants the wrong person access.
Protect contents where appropriate
Encryption can make message contents harder for an unintended recipient to read, as described in a regulator case study involving a complaint letter attached to an email sent to the wrong address. It is a layer for limiting exposure, not a way to correct the recipient choice or avoid assessing what happened. The Data Protection Commission case studies discuss the incident and the role of encryption.
These safeguards involve trade-offs: confirmation and suggestion controls act before sending, a delay creates a brief opportunity to intervene, and portals or encryption can limit what an unintended recipient can access. Organizations should choose controls that fit their systems and the sensitivity of the information rather than assuming one measure prevents every error.
What to do if personal information went to the wrong address
First, establish what was sent, who received it, and whether the recipient could access or read it. Use the organization’s incident-response process to contain exposure—for example, by asking the recipient to delete the message or disabling access to a shared document where possible. Record the facts and assess the potential risk to the people whose information was involved. The applicable reporting and notification duties depend on jurisdiction and the circumstances; do not treat one regulator’s guidance as a universal rule.
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission identifies email sent to the wrong recipient because a service predicted an address from the first characters entered as a common breach scenario. Its guidance says that where the incident is likely to pose a risk to data subjects, the organization must notify the Commission under Article 33(1). This is Ireland/EU guidance; organizations elsewhere must consult the rules that apply to them. The Irish Data Protection Commission’s breach guidance sets out its jurisdiction-specific information.
What changed in Shinder’s organization
Shinder reports that after removing remembered external suggestions, adding confirmations for messages with external recipients and attachments, introducing a 60-second send hold, and moving sensitive documents to sign-in portals, misaddressed messages fell by about two thirds in six months. That is a self-reported before-and-after outcome; the account does not describe a controlled evaluation, so it cannot establish that these measures alone caused the reduction.
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