Data Protection

A couple of weeks ago, I started a new job. As part of the training, I did a short course on Data Protection. I mention this because parts of it came back to me last night after watching a report on Watchdog regarding various data protection breaches emanating from Her Maj’s Revenue & Customs department. The largest breach, the missing discs with the 25 million child benefit claimants is still at large, but these other leeks are perhaps more worrying.

The most interesting part of the training related to working conditions which would see a rise in security breaches. These include Autocratic Line management, over emphasis on performance targets, lack of an audit trail and low morale. Bearing in mind that politicians of both colours were engaging in race to see how many jobs they could axe from the civil service (sorry, they were identifying savings) during the last Westminster election campaign, you would think that perhaps that they would take some of the blame.

Err no, it would appear that it was some managers fault. In the mean time, there is no sign of the discs, the mistakes and breaches pile up, and the missing data has fallen off the news agenda.