Computer Age: Police Still Lose Paper Records Shock

You wait for a data loss story for weeks, and five come along at once. David Ottewell makes an anti-computerised data scoop today out of four cases of carelessness over paper records and just one of digital data loss. In each case the lost or mislaid data was recovered, no harm done.

It's a good set of stories. Though I'm not sure Tory hyperventilation on iD cards or breathless comparison with 25M records on CD-ROMs is balanced and proportionate. These are very much old school data losses of the kind that Life on Mars might have experienced almost daily.

The famous five: Crime Data 1 - Crime Data 2 - Crime Data 3 - Insurance Data -
Lib Dem Council Data. Only the last - an unencrypted data stick, reaching a Tory councillor by uncertain means - is digital.

iD Cards? I'm agin 'em. But sorry, these aren't a compelling case against them.