U.S. PIRG Consumer Blog: Britain's exchequer, ministry of silly walks, loses unencrypted data on 25 million of her majesty's subjects

Despite the lessons from two years of high profile data breaches in the U.S., with banks, stores and government agencies leaving unencrypted data on computer tapes and disks to be stolen, lost in shipping or on airport baggage carousels or left somewhere by a hapless intern, or using sloppy computer programs so data can be plucked out of the air, I guess not everyone has learned. Britain's chancellor of the Exchequer is fumbling through bumbling explanations, as the New York Times reporter Eric Pfanner explains in his story Data Leak in Britain Affects 25 Million:

The British government struggled Wednesday to explain its loss of computer disks containing detailed personal information on 25 million Britons, including an unknown number of bank account identifiers, in what analysts described as potentially the most significant privacy breach of the digital era.

The Times goes on to point out the robustness of this trove:

But the disks lost in Britain contained detailed personal information on 40 percent of the population: in addition to the bank account numbers, there were names, addresses and national insurance numbers, the British equivalent of Social Security numbers. They also held data on almost every child under 16.

The BBC says:

The fallout was never going to be pretty but the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, has been savaged in the British press.

The Globe and Mail points out that the campaign against a British national ID card has been buoyed by the events:

Phil Booth, the national co-ordinator of the NO2ID campaign group, said the government should not only immediately halt development of the cards but carry out an audit of the information it already held about the public. "This data disaster shows up the madness behind the government's ID schemes," he said.

No, it's not Monty Python's John Cleese, from the ministry of silly walks, it's just another silly government. Silly governments, silly firms and other silly data collectors haven't yet learned their important responsibilities of protecting the good names of their subjects, citizens, customers or accountholders. Without strong data protection laws that limit the collection of personal information, require it be protected by fair information practices and that hold collectors accountable when they fail, it'd be silly to think they ever will.