How often has a friend or relative told you of some battle with officialdom where they have repeatedly provided personal information yet have been unable to get the service they require? “I rang them up and they said they couldn’t find my file,” or “they’d apparently not received the application form” or “I have personally delivered the information to their office on several occasions but they are still claiming not to have received it”... and so on.
It occurred to me that other day, as we suffered yet another shower of news about lost laptops, computer disks - and ergo lost data - that it’s nothing new. In fact it's happening every day but most of the time we don't make quite the same fuss about it.
The only difference between computerised and paper-based systems is that when a laptop goes missing it could contain a million personal details, whereas a piece of paper is a piece of paper. The mislaying of the piece of paper is still a loss of data. If you can’t find the CD it’s lost, if you cannot say where someone's file is, it's effectively lost and could be in the wrong hands.
Maybe the next time someone says they cannot do their job because they cannot find information which has clearly been given to them, the solution is to mention two words “Information Commissioner".
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