Lost data / Regierung verliert Daten

Two computer discs holding the personal details of all families in the UK with a child under 16 have gone missing.

The Child Benefit data on them include name, address, date of birth, National Insurance number and, where relevant, bank details of 25m people.

(BBC news)

There is a video of the announcement in the House of Commons. Laughter when it was suggested that people should be careful about giving out their bank details when unexpectedly asked to do so on the phone or by email, and indignation when it was stated that the Data Protection Act had been breached.

Who needs Schäuble when you can get a government like this?

8 thoughts on “Lost data / Regierung verliert Daten

    • I don’t often have a good example.
      There is also the British National Corpus to find the context of a particular word (see sidebar link). And I intended to create a Google personalized search engine, full of legal texts in good English, but when I will get round to that I don’t know.

  1. The way the EU-law supremacy-cases Factortame I and II in the UK House of Lords was reported, in English, was suspend either the operation or application of the UK Merchant Shipping Act 1988, with a tendency to the former. So right!

    • Yes – if one wanted, one could narrow the search to BAILII (excluding the House of Lords) or to the House of Lords site. But it seems to me that the results are good enough without using such a narrow target.

    • I did not say any such thing. I assumed *you personally* did not use a search engine. When you write ‘with a tendency to the former’, I did perhaps wrongly assume that you had looked it up in your books. But this entry is about search engines, for people who do not have those verbs in their head and don’t want to spend time leafing through their law books!

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