U.K. Government Plagued by Data Loss Scandals

LONDON Nov. 13, 2008 -- Who can the British trust these days with their personal details? Many have been left questioning this as the U.K. Government continues to be rocked on a regular basis by a series of high-profile data loss scandals.

In the wake of the latest embarrassing data blunder, which saw a sensitive government memory stick found in a bar parking lot, Prime Minister Gordon Brown was forced to admit last week that the government can't make any promises when it comes to keeping the British public's personal details safe.

It's a promise that Brown knows his government hasn't been very good at keeping. An audit conducted by the civil rights watchdog Liberty claimed to show that the government had lost 30 million items of data in the past year.

The loss of a memory stick last week was minor in comparison to previous data disasters. Last month the Ministry of Defense lost a disk containing personal details of some 100,000 British military personnel.

In August, a Home Office contractor lost a memory stick containing information of about 84,000 prisoners in England and Wales, along with at least 33,000 police computer records. At the start of the year, details of 600,000 potential Navy recruits got misplaced in Birmingham.

In November last year, HM Revenue and Customs lost child benefit records with details of 25 million people. This was thought to be the world's biggest ID protection failure. These are just some examples.

Information stored digitally is only going to increase according to security expert Andrew Moloney. He told ABC News, "We reckon by 2011 there will be 10 times more digital information than there was in 2006."

Moloney works as the financial services and marketing director for RSA security. "If you think about the portability and the ease with which you can carry about gigabytes of information with you now you have the makings of a perfect storm."

Figures from three government departments reveal that in the past year a public official was questioned or dismissed over data loss nearly every single working day.