Here is an interesting report about "the Surveillance Society" we live in, its traps and tricks. How can we avoid fraudsters, phishing, identity theft?
This echoes Maxime's article called "Government offers reward in hunt for lost data"
"Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has lost computer disks containing the confidential details of 25 million child benefit recipients. The data, not encrypted, was were on a two computer disks sent from an HMRC office in Newcastle to the Insurer's headquarters in Edinburgh. But the disks, containing names, national insurance numbers, dates of birth and pension data never arrived. (...)
Today, Two CD's have been lost but it should be stressed that it's not an isolated case and I have found on the BBC website two other examples of mistakes of HMRC like that happened last month: HMRC sent some personal details to the wrong people in October, two months ago, and a laptop holding sensitive information was stolen in a car belonging to an HMRC worker, putting hundreds of people under the risk of fraud.
It's all the more paradoxical as Great Britain is well-known to be uncompromising in matters of security and safety. The number of video cameras in the streets of London testifies for it.
As far as I'm concerned, I would say that, finally, Big Brother is nothing more than a giant with feet of clay. "
Are you personally afraid that your data might be used by criminals ?
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3 comments:
It's amazing and in the same time awful that in UK, wich is known in matters of security, sensitive details about their own people were stolen. I totally understand that they are worried that some people stole it and use it. They can use it to contract a loan or some firms can screen for diseases about their employees. Thiefs can see where people live and know if they are rich or not.
Even if British don't want to have an ID card,soon they will have. They are kind of paranoid with security. But everybody may understand after learned that some dics were lost with sensitive details.
For my part, I think it is very outrageous such a problem could happen in the UK, a country which is as well known to be an example in surveillance society yet. I don't understand again how it was possible for the HMRC to lose disks so important, especially since it isn't the first time that a mistake was done. That must not be acceptable, since security of the half of the British population is at stake in these two CDs.
Consequently to this mistake, British people is right to be worry, because if the CDs fall into the hands of bad intentioned people, these ones could use it in order to profit from datas which not belong to them.
It's kind of terrifying to think that in a country like the UK, data of such importance is just stored on normal CD's and sent accross England like that. And if it happens there, it could very well happen in our country... Think of how we would feel if it were our data that's sitting somwhere - no one really knows where - and since it's not encrypted, anybody can just read it. As Céline said, if somebody gets a hold on these CD's, they could do some really dangerous things. I am realy not comfortable thinking that all my personal information might be on some CD that can be lost just by being sent from one city to another.
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