Britain gets cheeky with privacy
The British government has lost data on 25,000,000 citizens. The data includes personal information such as national insurance numbers (like our social security numbers) for every family in the UK that receives a government financial benefit for having children.
The data was sent on 2 CDs via a commercial delivery service and lost.
How stupid is that? They could easily have encrypted the data (they just used a password) and why did they feel the need to ship a physical CD anyway? Don't they have network connections.
This kind of incident, like the much larger Veteran's Administration case in the US a few years ago, highlights a key problem: government people have too much valuable personal information on their citizenry and too little responsibility and accountability.
I believe that when this kind of thing happens, there should be a witch hunt and everyone up and down the chain of command should be crisply toasted. Resignations are the minimum; how about criminal charges and financial sanctions? Until mass market identity screwups are punished in a grown up way, they will continue to occur.
Posted on November 21, 2007
