by Allan Norman

I took part in an opinion poll recently, where I was asked questions about who I would trust with my data. Banks? The Health Service? The local authority? Education institutions? The government? My answer was, "none". My answer to the follow up question was that I was most likely to trust a small local business or organisation. To put it another way, it seems that my levels of trust are inversely related to the chances of the organisation in question having a detailed Data Protection Policy.

It is, of course, the loss of a data stick containing details of the prison population that prompted these reflections. I have commented on data protection before, how willing we are to understand that it encompasses and regulates whether we tell people things they need to know. How did we come to lose sight of the fact that Data Protection also encompasses protecting data on data sticks?

Read the complete post at http://www.communitycare.co.uk/blogs/social-care-experts-blog/2008/08/childrens-databases-lost-datas.html