Shutting the door after the horse has bolted
The report on the Barnet and Potters Bar Times website that Barnet Council has managed to lose sensitive personal data on 9000 children during a domestic burglary is worrying enough, but I get the feeling we are in another of those situations where an individual is going to be hung out to dry for the failings of the organisation as a whole.
Unencrypted data may well have been taken out of the office against the regulations but it was obviously too easy to do so. What needs to happen urgently is a review of office procedures and the controls that are in place on sensitive data. My experience as a school governor leads me to believe that Barnet’s schools are not sufficiently aware that they should encrypt sensitive data and that the lead from the Council has not been there in ensuring that they do.
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Duncan
This incident was as avoidable as it is embarrassing for the council, but it is a situation which is repeated up and down the country on an all too regular basis. How many more times do people in the state sector need to be told to encrypt personal and sensitive data?
Perhaps a more pertinent issue, however, is why this data needed to be held in a council worker’s home.
The state holds far too much unnecessary information on its citizens and rather than concentrate too much on the security angle, I would rather we question whether so much data needs to be collected at all.
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