Database State

In October 2007  Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs lost two discs containing a copy of the entire child benefit database. Suddenly issues of privacy and data security were on the front page of most newspapers and leading the TV news bulletins. The old line ‘if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear’ was given a very public rebuttal. The millions of people affected by this data loss, who may have thought they had nothing to hide, were shown that they do have much to fear from the failures of the database state.

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