I shudder when I look at some of the losses there have been in data and then the amount of people who complain that it's all down to computers. Here's a big secret; it isn't. Late last years someone bought a system on eBay which had loads of private information on the hard drive. It should, said the original owner (the Social Services in the UK if I recall correctly) have been destroyed, whereas it looked as though someone had stolen it from a dump.
Well guess what - that's the fault of the person whose job it was to destroy the data in the first place, not the poor sap who ends up with a bunch of loose information and who's then honest enough to alert the authorities.
And now we have this - a Health Trust in the UK losing 6000 records because they were on a memory stick and (here's the bit that has me boggling) although it was password protected, the password was attached to the drive on a Stickie/Post-it-Note.
Once again a number of people are blaming technology. Once again, I put it to the assembled masses that the problem wasn't with the IT but with the fool who thought sticking a confidential password to the item it was supposed to be protecting was a good - or even acceptable - idea. Not to mention his or her employers, whose training policies on the subject need urgent review.
I'll stop ranting and will calm down before my next entry. But as a citizen of the country that's made such a stupid mistake and seems to continue doing so, I can't help but be annoyed!
