children must not be next victims of

Children must not be next victims of data loss

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The Ministry of Defence has brought us the latest data disaster,

putting 600,000 sailors, pilots and potential recruits at risk by

losing their detailed personal information. And like the debacle at

Revenue and Customs, the MoD is trying to pin the blame on the junior

naval officer who lost the laptop, rather than the far more senior

officials who commissioned systems that allow so much data to be

downloaded onto an individual laptop. As I told Radio 4, while

government departments collect and store so much sensitive personal

data in centralised databases, we will go on seeing these massive data

losses.

You would hope other departments would be learning from these very

serious mistakes. However, it seems that the Department for Children

is ploughing ahead with their plans to build a centralised database on

all 11 million children in England. Action on Rights for Children has

produced three short videos explaining the problems with this

ContactPoint system, featuring interviews with Prof Ross Anderson,

Terri Dowty, Dr Liz Davies, Shami Chakrabati and myself.