With all the news stories about peoples confidential data being lost, stolen, or seemingly vaporized, I wasn't too surprised to read about the loss of a hard drive containing personal details of three million candidates for the UK driving theory test which has gone missing from a "secure facility" in, amazingly enough, Iowa! Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly has told the House of Commons that the hard drive went missing in May, but 'only' includes name, address, phone number and email - no financial data. I can't imagine why any British organization would have been squirrelling this data away anywhere, never mind in Iowa. There may be a rationale for retention of test results for future analysis, but the personal details of the candidates are of negligible relevance, and the long term retention of such data seems neither proportionate nor sensible. Is this simply another demonstration of the ever increasing obsession with retaining all forms of data that we seem to be increasingly engulfed in?
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Now go find your hard drive!
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