11.20.07
Incompetence
Two posts in one day? Well lets just say I am fast going from someone without any ideas of what to write to someone who is full of them (at long last). Sometimes you happen to read something that so incenses you that you just have to write about it and this is just one such occasion.
We are told to take care of our personal data. Anything with our names, addresses, dates of birth and the like could be valuable to someone wanting to steal your identity; many of us now shred our bills and other documents likely to fall into this category. shredding gives me immense pleasure, but I am very sad.
Now I discover it is not necessary for me to bother since her majesty’s revenue and customs department have sent my full details including national insurance number, date of birth, address and maybe even bank details by unregistered post on a CD and lost it along with 25 million other records. We are also told that while this is an unfortunate matter we have no need to worry about identity fraud.
I am glad to see that someone has taken responsibility and resigned, but in what world does any government employee think it is ok to send my personal data on a CD by post when it is well known that the mail service in this country is at best just about reasonable and on a bad day is rubbish.
The BBC version of events can be found here
Michael Woo said,
November 21, 2007 at 10:18 am
wat’s this about?
Julie said,
November 21, 2007 at 1:58 pm
Read the link!!
It is about the government losing 2 CDs containing the personal details of 25 million people who either claim child benefit for their children or are the children themselves. This includes dates of birth, national insurance numbers and bank account details.
turnthetables said,
November 22, 2007 at 10:38 pm
Im not really bothered whether the junior involved resigned or not. It appears the whole IT system they are running on is generally flawed if someone as junior as that is given blanket access to that amount of data, and, is able to burn it to a CD without some kind of encryption automatically kicking in. If the data had been encrypted the transit method and loss of the disc would be nowhere near as big of an issue.
Julie said,
November 23, 2007 at 7:18 am
In terms of resignation i was meaning the person at the top of the organisation who has taken responsibility. I do not believe that the junior officials should either resign or be sacked as they were following orders and probably being paid a pittance to do so. I agree about encryption though it was a false economy to say that giving just NI numbers and childrens dates of birth or what ever it was the audit office wanted, was too expensive.