Government 'lax' data protection
Updated on 14 March 2008
MPs are criticising the "lax standards" of government departments in protecting personal information.
The report, from the Joint Committee on Human Rights, comes as details, released through the Freedom of Information Act, have revealed how many of those departments lack basic systems to comply with the Data Protection Act.
A survey of 14 departments by the British Computer Society published today, revealed that none of them had statistics of how many errors were on their database, nor had a budget to correct them.
The loss of 25m child benefit records by the HM Revenue & Customs last year when computer discs were mislaid has hugely dented trust in the government's ability to look after personal data.
MPs today said it was typical of what they called "lax standards" and a "cavalier attitude" to protecting privacy.
MPs today said it was typical of what they called "lax standards" and a "cavalier attitude" to protecting privacy.
The British Computer Society survey revealed that two thirds said their level of trust in government data management had fallen.
4 per cent found their data was incorrect - a fairly typical error rate for big databases.
And 77 per cent said having the automatic right to correct wrong data was very important to them.
Channel 4 News has seen evidence that helps to explain why trust in the government's ability to look after personal data securely is so low.
We've seen freedom of information requests to 14 government departments - including the ones with huge databases like revenue and customs, health, and work and pensions that reveals they lack the basic systems for proving they comply with the Data Protection Act.
All but two of the government departments had no written policy or procedure for correcting information that was wrong and one had been independently audited to check they looked after data properly.
Such audits are commonplace in big businesses that run databases, but it's against this background of missing public sector accountability for errors that ministers want to introduce a huge computer identity register for ID cards.
