An audit of the safety systems of Scotland’s municipalities has shown that over the last 5 years, information on over 10,000 people has disappeared.
According to a report composed according to results of an audit of Scotland’s government bodies’ performance, since 2007 carelessness or negligence on the part of local government bodies’ employees led to the loss of notebooks, USBs and other carriers of confidential information, including Blackberry phones storing confidential correspondence and etc. The total number of incidents was over 250.
In the West Lothian region alone there were 47 cases of information leakage, affecting 4,500 people. Highland’s municipality had 9 incidents with information loss affecting nearly 2,000 people. In East Lothian slightly fewer citizens were affected by the leakage – around 200. In the Aberdeenshire area, local authorities registered 2 lost notebooks, CDs, and USBs containing schoolchildren’s photographs and personal information.
Officials could not provide exact information about the number of victims, but they noted that the number may be over 10,000.
A representative of Scotland’s conservative party noted that the conditions for storing and using personal information contained in municipality systems do not accord with the requirements of the law on information protection. He expressed dissatisfaction with the officials’ performance and said they should review their methods of working with personal information and take the necessary measures to ensure the safety of highly confidential information about the country’s citizens.
Comment by Senior Analyst at InfoWatch Nikolai Fedotov: «The USA has the highest leakage rate. If we take the statistics for that country and summarize the number of records of personal information put at risk (considering that it is not 100% correct since the same person can have several personal information records in different databases), we will see that over one year, the data of 70%-80% of the population is put at risk. Over five years, this probably includes all the citizens.
So the report from Scotland actually shows the merit of the local authorities and how well they protect their electorate’s information. The statistics are very good indeed».
