It turns out that HM Revenue and Customs have given our family's personal details to persons unknown by sending them, along with those of 7 million other families who claim child benefit, on disk, via a courier, who lost them. Nice. Chancellor Alistair Darling has apologised for the security lapse, but apparently there is little danger of identity theft. According to the BBC:
The records include parents' and children's names, addresses, dates of birth, child benefit and national insurance numbers and in some cases, bank or building society details.
That sounds like plenty of information for bad guys to be going on with.
There are, of course, calls for Darling to resign. While I love to see a good bit of bloodletting, I'm not sure that he needs to go in this case. The chairman of HMRC has already resigned over this and an investigation is underway. The Revenue had better get its arse in gear over data protection before this happens again.
Actually, when I first came across this story I thought it was just a follow-up to the story from a few weeks back where HMRC lost a load of personal data in transit and more details were now coming out. But no, this is a new and separate cock-up, albeit one of a very similar shape.
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