The event most worthy of note this week has been the debacle of the missing data of 25 million British people, floating around on 2 CDs somewhere between the Revenue and Benefits office in Tyne & Wear and the National Audit office in London. Good grief! It looks like what happened is that the Audit Office wanted some names and addresses, but it was easier to just copy the whole of the database rather than do a query. This is probably because all this IT stuff gets outsourced (costing us taxpayers billions by the way) and no-one internal actually knows how the database works, so they would have had to get someone else to do it.
No-one knows where the data is, and police have been searching for it, and it could turn up behind a desk somewhere I guess, but my theory is that someone has taken it home thinking one day they can make a lot of money this, but then got scared, and/or possibly waiting for the fuss to die down before doing anything with the disks. There's always the chance that it will mysteriously re-appear when they think nobody's looking. I wonder if they've realised that they could bring down the whole UK banking system – Northern Rock? peanuts!
One consequence of this state of affairs has been some backtracking in plans to introduce ID cards, requiring a national database – the argument being that we can't be sure the data would be safe. Well der! Personally, I have never been naïve enough to believe that our personal data stays in one place. I know that companies buy and sell it so they can use it for marketing purposes or whatever. The situation is not helped by the fact that UK government has a history of continuing to pay companies to create these ridiculously unreliable IT systems (see health service for details) instead of getting someone who knows what they're on about to do it. Will they ever learn?
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