Tom Hollander says he received Avengers bonus payslip meant for Tom Holland.

Celebrity News makes a neat segway to remind everyone about the importance of data privacy.

So it’s unusual for a celebrity news story to really draw my interest, but the above headline caused me much confusion. For me, as a tech professional with a passion for ensuring data is being used responsibly, I was surprised that none of the coverage was about the data privacy issues in this story.

In case you didn’t realize, professionals around the globe like myself, who are interested in Data protection and privacy, are marking Data Privacy Week. The annual observance, already underway, leads up to International Data Privacy Day on January 28, which seeks to raise awareness about data protection and privacy issues.

So, let’s dig into the issue.

Speaking to Late Night host Seth Meyers, Hollander said: “We were with the same agents briefly, and people in the accounts department got confused. It’s been very difficult because, you know, I was here first, but he’s enormously famous,” he added jokingly.

Explaining how he discovered the accidental payment, Hollander said he was watching a friend in the theatre who was being paid £300. “I sat smugly in the audience having just done a BBC show for £30,000 or something which was going to get me through the next year or so, and I was thinking, ‘Well, this is marvelous, I’m very prosperous.’”

Tom Hollander won a Bafta for his supporting role in the BBC’s drama The Night Manager. At the interval, he checked his emails and saw one containing a payslip labeled as “Box office bonus for The Avengers.” “It was an astonishing amount of money,” the 56-year-old told Meyers. “It was not his salary. It was his first box office bonus. Not the whole box office bonus, the first one. And it was more money than I’d ever seen. It was a seven-figure sum.” “My feeling of smugness disappeared,” he added.

To me, this is a shocking example of a breach in data protection. While Tom Hollander was quite gracious about the pay differential, imagine this happening in your organization. For me, it also shows a lack of respect by the organization in managing that data. We can’t comment on how this happened, but they dont have any excuses. I hope the organization is looking at the processes they have in place and ensure that they improve. Depending on where this fault occurred, it’s almost certainly a breach of local data protection regulations. If this had happened in a country covered by the GDPR legislation, the fines can be up to 20 million euros, or in the case of an undertaking, up to 4 % of their total global turnover of the preceding fiscal year, whichever is higher.

At IBM, we have data privacy as one of the five pillars of our approach to ethical AI. Respect for privacy means full disclosure around what data is collected, how it will be used and stored, and who has access to it. As we enter this era of AI, we can’t afford to ignore the importance of data privacy. It is important for two reasons: 1) It’s about doing the right thing 2) As a community, if we want to gain the confidence of our stakeholders, we need to show true leadership around respecting people’s data.