An ex-husband who was the subject of a barring order got his wife's voice-mail access codes reset so he could access her voice-mail, according to the Data Protection Commissioner's annual report.
This happened despite the fact that his wife had changed the telephone account details from his name to hers.
Eircom was not able to establish how this had happened, but accepted that the man had either obtained the account number or had perhaps "spun a plausible story" to Eircom.
Data Protection Commissioner Joe Meade said Eircom had put extra controls in place to ensure this could not happen again.
The Data Protection Commissioner criticised a former Fingal county councillor for failing to co-operate with the office.
Jon Rainey was a Fine Gael member of the council in 2003 when he sent an unsolicited e-mail to constituents. It was alleged that he had "harvested" the e-mail addresses from a group e-mail sent by a councillor from another political party.
Harvesting is where an e-mail recipient takes the e-mail addresses on a "cc" line of an e-mail and adds them to their own mailing list.
Mr Meade said he was naming Mr Rainey in the report because he had failed to co-operate with the investigations.
"His attitude to my office was that the matter was of little consequence and he complained that I had 'pestered' him," Mr Meade said.
Mr Rainey could not be contacted for comment yesterday.
The Bar Council changed publishers of its in-house legal diary in 2002 but the original publishers, Ashville Media Group, then used the information in its own publication in 2003 and 2004.
The information included addresses and other contact details for barristers.
Ashville Media Group contended that the information was already in the public domain, but the Data Protection Commissioner found that the publisher had contravened legislation because personal data obtained for one purpose should not be used for a different purpose.
Mr Meade said Ashville Media Group had been very helpful and co-operative in the investigation of the case so proceedings were not instituted.
The names, salaries and job histories of 260 employees and former employees of a financial institution were disclosed to more than 100 prospective job applicants by a recruitment agency.
The financial institution had inadvertently attached the details when sending a spreadsheet of vacancies and job profiles to the recruitment agency.
"While the recruitment agency had controls in place to ensure that personal data was not disclosed, nevertheless an employee deliberately overwrote those controls when he was having difficulty with the system in order to circulate the spreadsheet expeditiously," Mr Meade said.
He said his office would conduct a privacy audit on recruitment agencies as this was the third time in the last year that problems had arisen with such agencies.
A politician breached data protection legislation by using a party database to send out an appeal for charity funds, the Data Protection Commissioner found.
Mr Meade said the party member was well-intentioned, but had breached legislation because data collected for one purpose cannot be used for another purpose without prior consent.