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The Loss Of Government Held Data Hits UK Individuals18th December 2007 - The massive loss of government held data has been announced. After the reveleations by Chancellor Darling about HMRC losing disks with 25 million people's information on, it would seem that things for the government cannot get much worse. How wrong we would be... It has been announced yesterday by Ruth Kelly that more information has been lost or misplaced. This relates to around 3 million leaner drivers who have applied for driving tests. The data appears to have been lost 'in house' by a data processor based in the United States. But that wasn't all! How could it be? It has also been announced that HMRC has had more information go missing. This time, the details relate to 6,500 people who are pension contributors to schemes operated by Countrywide Assured. The links to both of these stories are located below. This raises interesting questions about the role of information and government in modern day Britain. As has been mentioned elsewhere on this site, the aim is not to offer political opinions. Instead, we try to help modern people avoid that most modern of crimes - Identity theft. However, it seems almost churlish to avoid the links to other big political projects that these leaks provide. Two of these massive data collection projects are the proposed Identity Card scheme - including biometrics and fingerprints of every UK resident - and road pricing - which would involve tracking the movements of every car in Britain by camera or satellite. Both projects will collect enormous amounts of data on a scale that the average person will simply be unable to comprehend. Yet, the government and successive Home Office Ministers and representatives have explained how the collected information will be 'safe and secure' and cannot fall into the wrong hands. It simply cannot happen and 'we' need to trust that this will be the situation. Over recent weeks, announcement after announcement has suggested that actually our sensitive and personal information is NOT safe and secure in the hands of government. In fact, it seems that the least secure place to store personal information right now is with the government. Up and down Britain, day in and day out, people use credit and store cards to make purchases and customer loyalty cards to obtain discounts. But how often do we hear about information loss from these companies? Very rarely. How many more times will we read about the massive loss of government held data? We are not sure that we want commercial organisations to hold such information about us either, but they do at least appear to take the responsibility seriously. In our experience, the terms of the Data Protection Act are taken seriously in the world of commerce. Do civil servants use the same care and attention? Links to the BBC reports:
BBC Report - Learner Driver Data Loss
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