Those in the UK will be all too aware of how government departments have been leaking UK residents data more furiously than a fire-hose blasting through a colander.
Following the loss of the bank details of 25 million UK families a few weeks ago, another loss has come to light.
The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) – equivalent to the US DMV – has sent confidential details to 1,215 people to the wrong people.
The questionnaire displayed the drivers’ names, addresses, birth dates, licence numbers and motoring offences records.
DVLA chief executive Noel Shanahan apologised and said it was in the process of contacting customers who have been affected. The DVLA put it down to “human error.”
Shanahan told the BBC that the problem first came to light after the DVLA get calls from those who had received the envelopes.
The DVLA have setup a dedicated support line to help people who have been effected – 0800 085 2333.
Shower of cats
Hats off to The Reg who have a great opening line in its coverage, “Today’s government data loss comes courtesy of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) in Swansea.”
That just about sums it up. We shudder to think about the impact of this type of data loss in a world where all of the UK citizens were held on a single ID Card database.
Here’s the truth – the Government and their departments cannot be trusted with the personal and private information of the UK citizens.
[image courtesy of Motorcycle news]
If I were in charge of the Government’s computer systems I’d be seriously considering installing a solid API right now to make all this data “loss” easier to manage on a common platform.
Something like what Facebook did a while ago. The DVLA for example could adopt Google’s Open Social maybe?
Then the Government would appear all trendy web2.0 as forward thinking rather than looking foolish when they lose discs in the back of a UPS van etc.
I’ve already started development of my Inland Revenue “Compare tax payments with your friends” Facebook application.
Howard
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Like the thinking on the API Howard – and the Facebook App!
I know the heart of this piece is data security, but for a long time I’ve been wincing that the H U G E amount of our tax that is handed out the companies to build software to run the government infrastructure – pensions, tax, etc.
My suggestions. Create and publish the specification for these mammoth system – let open source collectives in on the act. I think they’ll create system far superior and potentially for free.
A percentage of the billions of pounds that would normally be spend/wasted on the commercial solution could then be directed to the causes that the team member felt were important to support, based on the amount of work that they put into the project.
What do you think?