Re: Major UK Gov't Data loss

[David Farber <dfarber () cs cmu edu>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Ross Stapleton-Gray <ross () stapleton-gray com>
Date: November 21, 2007 12:40:51 PM EST
To: dave () farber net, ip () v2 listbox com
Subject: Re: [IP] Major UK Gov't Data loss

At 12:34 AM 11/21/2007, Paul Davey wrote:
> Apparently the UK tax office has lost two disks (CD/DVD?) of 25
> million "Child Benefit" users - names, DOBs and for many families bank
> account details. In short the works. (Out of a UK population of ~60
> million this is pretty impressive.)
> ...
> Seems to be yet another combination failure of legacy systems, human
> error in not following procedure(s) and some bad luck.

But if nothing at all had gone wrong, it's still the case that some  
collection of individuals had and have ready access to 25M records  
useful for identity theft, namely staff at the UK tax office.  If  
you're staring into a meager future pension, in a world where  
inflation is going to devour your standard of living, that might look  
like a rather attractive "retirement benefit."  We're worried about  
two lost disks (or discs, I suppose, in the local parlance)... why  
shouldn't we worry about N copies of those, readily made and eminently  
portable?

We ought to ensure that information that's easy to get is less useful  
than it apparently is (e.g., masking things like SSNs) and making it  
more in the interest of banks and credit card companies to prevent  
identity theft.

Ross


----
Ross Stapleton-Gray, Ph.D.
Stapleton-Gray & Associates, Inc.
http://www.stapleton-gray.com
http://www.sortingdoor.com






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