Only those with their heads in the sand over the last couple of years can fail to have missed the steady stream of reports of personal data lost by both Government and private companies.

The Open Rights Group, of which I am a member, maintain a page on UK Privacy Debacles listing all the incidences they are aware of.  In December last year they also published a simple on-line survey for people to use to determine how likely it is that their data has been involved in any of these losses.

I’d recommend running through the survey.  If nothing else it gives you a sense of the amount of personal data lost and the huge range of organisations involved.  Food for thought given the current popularity of big, intrusive database projects with politicians.