What were they thinking?...

There was a news article on the British Ministry of Defense site, about the loss of a laptop containing a large quantity of personal data. As I read the article for more detail, it was shocking to find that the personal information of about 600,000 people was on that laptop. Information that includes passport details, national insurance numbers, family details and doctors' addresses for people who submitted an application to the forces, and even bank details for some 3500 people.

My first thought was "What were they thinking, when they kept that kind of information on a laptop? Which incidentally was kept in the car of a junior Royal Navy office, when it got stolen during the night. There are a couple of things wrong with this picture:

• Such confidential information should never have been kept on a laptop in the first place. Especially when it concerns details of more than half a million people. This information should only be kept on a central computer within a secure data center.
• Keeping the laptop in the car during the night is a sign of carelessness and a lack of concern for the data it contains (unless the person is totally unaware of what the laptop contain). Again when such information are stored on the laptop, it should never even be left out of sight, unless properly locked away.

The article also mentioned "The Ministry of Defense is treating the loss of this data with the utmost seriousness". Well it should have been that they treated the confidentiality of this data with utmost seriousness, to begin with. If this has been so, the incident would not have happened, much less the embarrassments caused by it.

This isn't the first time I have read news of such incident. And it certainly won't be the last time either, as long as people or organization, whether corporate or governmental, remain slack in their treatment of the confidentiality of other people's personal information.