Personal details of about 350 past and present manufacturing employees of Freescale Semiconductor at East Kilbride, including salaries and redundancy payments, were made available accidentally for general staff viewing for about three years on the company's intranet site, The Herald has learned.

The data protection debacle has come to light at a time when US-based Free-scale is preparing to end production at East Kilbride, where it employs about 750 people in manufacturing and around 250 others in support functions and in research and development activities.

The Herald was tipped off about Freescale's publication of the raft of confidential information by a long- standing employee.

Freescale's investigations into the matter have shown that the confidential folder was accessed by employees at East Kilbride before the electronics company became aware that the personal details did not have the password-protection which should have been incorporated. It says it does not know how many people accessed the information.

Venture capitalist-owned Freescale's handling of the East Kilbride plant closure, particularly the length of time it took to confirm its plans to quit production at this site, has already angered many employees.

The Herald revealed in June last year that Freescale planned to stop manufacturing at East Kilbride but it took the company nearly another month to tell its employees this was in fact the case. It made no public announcement about its plans until September last year.

In June this year, The Herald revealed Freescale had slashed the redundancy entitlement of its workers at East Kilbride by about 30% only months before its plans to axe the plant emerged.

Workers say they were told by Freescale in 2006 that the cut in redundancy terms would help secure their jobs "until 2010 and beyond". These people are now losing their jobs as Freescale exits East Kilbride.

Freescale has now written to all those affected by its data protection error detailing what information about them was posted on the intranet. It yesterday emphasised its investigations had indicated there was no reason to believe the sensitive information, which it made available unwittingly, had been or would be misused.

A spokeswoman for Free-scale at East Kilbride confirmed yesterday that the confidential electronic folder had related to a 2005 severance scheme - meaning the personal details of the approximately 350 people affected were accessible on the intranet for about three years before the oversight was discovered by management. She described it as an "entirely regrettable" situation. She emphasised Freescale was taking the matter "extremely seriously", and had apologised to those affected.

The spokeswoman said: "On Friday 15th August, it basically came to management's attention that there was an electronic folder, which we had understood to be secure with password protection, which was actually accessible on the Freescale intranet. It was only available for viewing within Freescale.

"By the time it came to our attention, our understand- ing was a number of Free-scale employees had looked at it."

She added: "As soon as this was brought to our attention, the first thing to do was to secure the folder (and) make sure all other personal details were secure.

"What we have done since then is we have started an investigation and we have contacted every individual who was mentioned in the folder."

Asked how many people had been affected, she replied: "There were approximately 350. They were all employed in manufacturing at East Kilbride in 2005.

"Basically, the folder related specifically to a severance programme in 2005. For the majority of people, it just included names and addresses. For some people, it did contain some salary details. For some former employees, it did contain severance amounts."

She added: "We were working on the basis that this folder was password-protected. It turned out it wasn't. Obviously, we take it extremely seriously. We acted immediately. We have written to everybody saying we absolutely regret this has happened."

Asked whether it was an embarrassment for a company in the technology sector to make such a mistake, she replied: "Our understanding at the moment is it was down to human error. We are still investigating it. We do regret that it happened. That is why we contacted each individual to make them aware."

She was unable to say how many of the workforce, which comprises directly-employed staff and agency workers, had looked at the personal details posted unprotected on the intranet.

Freescale's website puts its worldwide workforce at 24,000, in more than 30 countries.

But the spokeswoman was confident that, although the intranet is available to Freescale workers around the world, the folder with the details of East Kilbride personnel had only been accessed from the Lanarkshire site.

The spokeswoman said: "My understanding is that obviously the intranet is something that is global but that this document was only viewed from East Kilbride."

She denied a claim made to The Herald that those who had accessed the confidential employee information would be disciplined.

The spokeswoman said: "No disciplinary action has been instigated. Our priority is to understand who has viewed the information and whether there is any risk associated with this. At the moment, we have no reason to believe the information has been or will be misused."

Freescale was spun out of Motorola in 2004 and taken off the New York Stock Exchange in late 2006 through a $17.6bn acquisition by venture capitalists Blackstone, Texas Pacific, Carlyle and Permira.