Editor's Blog: Less data equals more privacy

It's been a while since I've mentioned silicon.com's Full Disclosure campaign, which is aimed at improving the way organisations - both private and public sector - look after our data.

We kicked off the campaign early last summer and little did we expect that it would become a national issue when in November the taxman managed to misplace a couple of CDs containing records of 25 million people. For a brief time data protection and the impact of data breaches was staple tea-break conversation up and down the land.

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Still, that was seven months ago - a very, very long time in politics. And it seems that, for all the talk at the time of getting tough on data breaches, very little has changed. Which is why it was depressing to read a couple of stories on silicon.com this week.

Yesterday we revealed there have been 30 data losses in central government, 50 in public sector organisations and 17 in local government in the months since the HMRC embarrassed itself.

And worse - plans to encrypt sensitive data on NHS systems also appear to be missing the deadlines set by strategic health authorities.

It's a sorry story for the public sector to be in, and clearly the lessons of the taxman's blunder have still not been learned.

Perhaps civil servants have been waiting for the publication of the Poynter report into the loss of the HMRC discs before deciding to raise their game. Or more likely they've already forgotten about all of last year's fuss and have gone back to business as usual.

It seems strange that - for some reason - the government has decided it really, really wants lots of our personal data - and proposals such as the ID card will only add to that. Yet at the same time there are plenty of public servants who don't see any value to that data at all.

Perhaps if we gave them less of our data, rather than more, then they would learn to treat it with more respect.

Perhaps if they realised this wasn't an inexhaustible well of data for them to dip into whenever their leaky databases start to run dry, they might be a little more careful about conserving it.

Our private, sensitive data is still being treated in a cavalier way by civil servants who still don't see the value of it. And that's why our Full Disclosure campaign will continue.

Editor's choice - three things you should check out on silicon.com this week:
Check out our latest piece of video looking at flexible IT, enjoy the great photo story we've put together chronicling Bill Gates through the years, and read our analysis of where the Redmond giant is likely to go next.