A large number of Espoo's coronavirus tracing calls were recorded without customers' knowledge from October last year until the end of January.
The calls were recorded by workers at Luona Oy, which provided roughly half of the municipality of Espoo's coronavirus tracing call services.
A person who has fallen ill with coronavirus or has been exposed to it will not have been aware whether they were contacted by a Luona employee or one of the city's own contact tracers.
A coronavirus contact tracer's job is to find out every movement and contact made by an infected person, including who the person has met and where they have been just before becoming infected with the virus.
Generally, the tracing calls are long and are very detailed and can also go through sensitive issues.
"Some of the things recorded on-tape have been so extreme that I have thought that they should not be heard by outsiders," said a nurse who contacted Yle's investigative journalism unit MOT.
The nurse was employed as a coronavirus contact tracer by Luona Oy in Espoo and is not named in this story as the person feared they could lose their job for speaking out.
Affairs, illegal activities and other personal details revealed
The nurse, along with other employees at Luona Oy found they were able to retrospectively listen to all the tracing calls they made from the calling system.
The calls were automatically stored on a programme called Benedesk, used by Luona. The numbers dialled were also visible in the programme.
According to the nurse, the contact tracers at Luona Oy were not advised to inform customers about the recording of calls.
Unlike in customer service numbers where a customer dials in themselves, an automatic notification of calls being recorded was not made at the start of contact tracing calls.
The nurse, as well as other contact tracing staff, became increasingly concerned as they started to think of all the sensitive information the recordings potentially included, such as personal details, social security numbers, telephone numbers and names.
"The calls can sometimes reveal affairs, illegal business, drug trafficking, unusual religious communities and illegal residence in the country," the nurse said.
"The people contacted also included celebrities and front-line politicians," the nurse said.
The nurse adds that a supervisor had stated they had listened to some of the calls that were made.
Not all employees were aware that the tracing calls were recorded.
Last autumn during an induction held for new employees, it was stated that calls would be recorded for call-quality and training purposes--but still no instructions were given to tell people that the calls would be recorded.
The nurse who contacted Yle says a contact tracer must establish a confidential relationship with the person who has been infected, so that they are able to open up about all the people, places, and movements they have had in the days leading up to their infection.
The nurse started to feel as though the secret recordings were betraying the trust of the people they were calling.
"I find it awful that we did not tell people the calls would be recorded," the nurse states.
Knowing that someone else could also listen to the conversations also felt bad.
"We didn't know where the recordings might end up, and what they might be used for. It felt awful to be a middleman--and the person who was also in the wrong by not telling the people we called that the conversation would be recorded," the nurse said.
"I was afraid that the recordings could potentially be used to blackmail people, like during the Vastaamo hacking and blackmailing scandal last year," the nurse added.
On the other hand, the nurses wondered whether the people they contacted would be as open about their whereabouts if they had been told the calls would be recorded. This would mean the contact tracing would not be successful.
On 21 January, the coronavirus contact tracers employed by Luona were told they had to stop recording the calls.
Luona decided to stop recording calls after staff members questioned the practice.
According to information obtained by Yle's MOT unit, contact tracers were told by supervisors in an email to turn off call-recording from their calling software.
The email also justified the new rules saying the city of Espoo's contact tracers do not record their calls either. The city of Espoo does not use the same software as Luona in its contact-tracing.
Yle looked into the Benedesk calling software used by Luona's coronavirus contact tracers, and noticed that callers were still able to listen back to calls they had made themselves, and record them--even after the recording was prohibited.
However, employees were no longer able to listen to calls made by others.
"We have failed."
Luona Oy's management acknowledges that tracing calls were recorded. They stated that recordings were made for quality and training purposes, and that the recording of calls was agreed with municipalities beforehand.
"Unless recording is specifically prohibited in agreements with municipalities, calls will be recorded for quality purposes. This allows us to check whether a customer has been correctly referred to healthcare services in time, for example," says Seppo Kariniemi, Director of Luona.
Kariniemi admits that people who were contacted should have been told the call would be recorded.
In addition to customer service representatives, Luona's management have access to the recordings, according to Kariniemi. Supervisors are only allowed to listen to recordings for clearly-defined reasons, such as in the event of a complaint, or if an employee has made an error.
He says the recordings should not be used for training purposes.
According to Kariniemi, it would have been the employees' job to tell people about the recording, as automated recordings are not available on the calling software used by Luona.
"If calls have been recorded, I would assume that callers have been instructed to notify people about it at the beginning of a call. If this has not happened, then we have failed in our guidance and training of new employees," Kariniemi says.
He also states that the company has hired large numbers of new employees very quickly during the pandemic.
Initially, Luona's director did not want to reveal how many tracing calls the company had made. A few days after being contacted by Yle's MOT, Kariniemi writes in an email that the company's contact tracers have made over 16,000 calls since 26 October last year.
However, according to Luona, not all calls that were made were coronavirus tracing calls, and the exact number of trace calls cannot be extracted from the Benedesk calling system.
The company has around 30 employees in Espoo. In addition to this, Luona's contact tracers also work in another city, but the director refused to say where.
Luona also stated that it destroyed all recordings made by contact tracers on February 11--the day after Yle contacted them.
The company also announced the ability to record tracings calls has now been removed.