It seems like the the government is intent on losing personal data on every person in Britain. They first lost the data of 25m people who claim child benefits [plus another six discs of personal information], then 3 million learner drivers details, then more information on a few more hundreds of thousands of people from nine NHS Trusts. And yet they are still losing more, with 600,000 people’s data being on an MoD laptop which was stolen, as well as “hundreds of documents containing sensitive personal data have been found dumped on a roundabout in Devon.”

By my calculations, that makes not far off 30 million people’s data having been lost by the government. Roughly half the population of the United Kingdom.

Doesn’t that make you feel secure about handing your data over the government?*

It is absolutely disgraceful that their security protocols are so poor, when they demand the information from us in the first place. I think that now, if it wasn’t already, the idea of any national ID card scheme, whether compulsory or not, is dead in the water. No-one with half a brain would trust the State with their personal details any more than absolutely essential. Unfortunately, what they do demand is more than enough.

* Yes, this is a rhetorical question
Sources: BBC, The Telegraph, The Times