Britain's Data Chernobyl: more lost CDs full of thousands of personal records
The DWP has personal records from each local council sent in each month by TNT courier, the same courier that lost the CDs sent by the Treasury.
The problem here isn't just sending CDs full of personal info around. Collecting mountains of personal information on law-abiding citizens is inherently dangerous -- just because it's easy to do, it doesn't follow that governments should do it. A system containing enormous amounts of high-value, high-risk information just begs to leak. Designing a government that requires this kind of data-retention and transfer is like designing a self-destruct button into a movie spaceship -- something so dangerous that the designer should really be forced to answer the question: "Is this really worth the risk of it going wrong?"
In the first week of August, Kirklees Council, in West Yorks, sent two discs containing the details of 45,000 residents to the DWP via the delivery firm TNT, which was also involved in transporting the child benefit records.Link (Thanks, Glyn!)On September 2, the DWP contacted officials at Kirklees to say the information had not arrived but was reassured when the council produced a TNT receipt.
On November 23, two days after the news that child benefit records had been lost was confirmed in the Commons, the council was told the discs were still missing. The DWP abruptly suspended data record exchanges.
A source at Kirklees Council, said: "The frightening thing is that when it happens, other councils are simply told, 'don't worry, just send us another disc'."
See also: UK tax-man repeatedly hemorrhages personal financial info of 25 MILLION Brits
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Allow me to be the first to obsessively point out the typo in the title of this post, unless someone beats me to it.
What!
A big bureaucracy losing something?!
I know for sure this would never happen here in the US!
Thank God I don't live in Great Britiain, where carelessness and government mishandlings multiply each day...threatening
entire peace-loving populations of Brits.
This is shameful.
It's worth pointing out that these records have not been lost in the post (as in The Royal Mail). They have been lost with a "specialist" courier TNT which is owned by the Dutch Post Office.
They aren't lost. Your gov is compiling lists. Just like every other gov in the world.
I always knew that such things can happen in governments of big countries but to actually lose data critical to financial safety of millions of citizens is something I've never dreamed of.
Ohioans feel your pain .. we had a backup tape for a statewide employee payroll system stolen from it's super secure location: the back seat of an intern's unlocked car.
Since I've done business with the state, my company data was on there. Hopefully it'll come to nothing, but it shouldn't have been there.
I've just received my letter apologising for losing my data but amusingly, they sent it to my old address despite having previously acknowledged my change of address.
More worringly though, the letter I received not only had name and address on it, it also had my childrens National Insurance numbers (social security), child benefit numbers and dates of birth on the letter - everything except from their bank details! I've had to carefully destroy that one!
I have a tip: calling it "Britain's data holocaust" would be a way to be even more inappropriate and overstating, at the same time!