Big Brother Watch has highlighted several losses of data over the last few days.
Last week they reported that "over 9,000 child details put at risk by Councils": the Information Commissioner had taken action against the London Borough of Barnet, West Sussex County Council and Buckinghamshire County Council for breaching the Data Protection Act. An unencrypted USB stick was stolen, an unencrypted laptop was stolen, and confidential documents were lost.
Today they note that two unencrypted laptops containing personal information relating to 17 patients were stolen from Birmingham Children's Hospital's Medical Day Centre.The laptops contained sensitive personal data such as patient diagnoses, video recordings and information on the health of the individual patients.
What sort of purblind idiots have failed to notice that sensitive personal data on portable devices must always be encrypted? Quite apart from the duty of state bodies to keep our data private, don't the people who work for them read the papers?
Or do they just shuffle on in their own insulated worlds, unaware of what's going on around them?
Maybe all state bodies should make failures like these a sacking offence. Then we'd see better compliance.
At the moment, who feels any pain?
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