Your personal data safe in their hands……?
Lady Bracknell, from Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest, argued that to lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose both looks like carelessness. Well, I’d be interested in how she would describe the DWP losing 40,000 sensitive Housing Benefit records last week. But that’s a drop in the ocean when you compare the HMRC losing 2 disks with sensitive information of up to 25 million individuals. I think it goes beyond carelessness.
The Chair of the HMRC, Paul Gray, resigned pretty much immediately, but was given a nice cushy job in the Cabinet Office where he continues to “earn” £200,000. Nice work for losing data. And doubtless to say that it will be some civil servant low down the pecking order who will get it in the neck while senior management ….get transferred and carry on earning a mega wage. His job now involves, laughably, developing projects to “develop Civil Servants skills“… I wonder if top priority in skill teaching includes,“How not to lose data”…?
There’s cold comfort for the HMRC as out of the top 5 “Oh dear, we have lost sensitive and personal data” scandals they appear 4th. And as Xmas is coming, the New Year is dawning and Channel 4 has been running Top 100 all-time….(fill-in-blanks).
Here are the Top 5 companies who have lost data through theft, incompetency, privatisation, contracting out and so on, all add to the mix.
1. TJX data heist (2007) - 45.7 million consumer records.
2. Card Systems (2005) hackers got access to 40 million cards details.
3. Dept. of Veterans Affairs (2006) social security data of over 26 million veterans stolen (and it was kept secret for 19 days!)
4. HMRC (2007) 25 million sensitive and personal data on 2 disks lost in the post.
5. Citigroup (2005) 3.9 million customers personal bank details lost in the post.
Your personal details safe in their hands. Don’cha feel so safe…..especially with ID cards around the corner.
Hat tip: Miles.
But, Louise, there’ll be “safeguards” on the ID cards. The government says so. That’s should be as much assurance as anyone should want or need. I have been assured and therefore am assured. Nothing else matters. We have been assured. So there.
Comment by Tawfiq Chahboune — 10 December, 2007 @ 10:18 pm
The Morning Star poited out two issues that have been overlooked by the media:
women are traceable on these DCs who have left abusive men
there are 350 people in the CDs who are in the witness protection programme. Whoops.
Comment by Andy — 10 December, 2007 @ 10:48 pm
Yeah, I am sooooooo reassured, Toff. Absolutely….New Labour are soooo trustworthy and decent.
That is really scary, Andy. I have been wondering about details re women leaving DV and didn’t occur to me about people on witness protection.
But one Big Mega Massive Whoops!
Comment by Louise — 10 December, 2007 @ 10:54 pm
Just in terms of playing it safe given the torrid couple of months these clowns have had, I can’t believe they’re going to try and push ID cards through. Who is advising the Brown inner circle, as it were? Every argument they have is terrible (and is shown to be within a matter of nanoseconds), and every decent argument is against, but this seems to be a government that has a death wish. And I wish them all the luck in the world with that wish. Why try and force through a measure that has almost no chance of going through? I hope they try it. They’ll lose and will look completely powerless and quite mad. That’ll be the end, and we can llok forward to the triumph of “Dave”.
Comment by Tawfiq Chahboune — 10 December, 2007 @ 11:32 pm