why o why is data protection that bad

news.bbc.co.uk...

Marks and Spencer has been found in breach of data protection rules after the theft of a laptop containing the personal details of 26,000 employees.

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said the data on the laptop, which was stolen from the home of an M&S contractor, was unencrypted.

The ICO has ordered M&S to make sure all laptop hard drives are fully encrypted by April 2008.

M&S said it would do everything it could to comply with the ICO order.

why is data protection so bad in the UK?
we are suppose to be a country with secure systems and files where we know the people we intrsut with our details keep it secure and out of Harms way,

the Goverment cant keep information secure
and now even stores cant either.

The whole data protection act is a Joke if no one is willing to protect the Data in the first place.

countries being Run by Morons

[edit on 25-1-2008 by bodrul]

I suspect that our Government and business has always been losing information and data, and with so much data now held on electronic devices, it is just that much easier to steal or lose.

Just imagine, 25 years ago losing all the child benefit information that was stored on just a few disks. It would have been mountains of paper or several odd sized tapes which very few people would have had the ability to upload and take the information off.

While I am sure the data protection act could be used to enforce better security of data, and certainly encrypting data is not a big task anymore, Government and Business just seem to think that computers are safe places to store information and in the vast majority of cases they are. It's just that huge amounts of informaton can be stored on a single laptop.

And I further suspect, many Government departments and Business have not seen data security as important or I few more likely, too expensive to implement and police so that have just not bothered until they are forced to.

That is what the data protection commissioner should be doing. Forcing with the threat of legal action, Government and Business to spend on data security.