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Losing Personal Info On A Laptop Could Get You Charged

Posted by Zonk on from the going-to-need-handcuffs dept.

E5Rebel writes "The UK's data protection watchdog has called for legislation that would punish corporate or government officials with access to the public's personal data ... who lose it. Unencrypted laptops with this personal information which are lost or stolen will see their owners facing criminal charges. 'HM Revenue and Customs is among the organisations that have recently suffered high profile data security breaches as a result of laptops being lost or stolen. The HMRC laptop containing taxpayer data was encrypted - but other organisations have often failed to encrypt their machines.'"

2 of 199 comments (clear)

  1. Good idea by gweihir · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think this is a good idea. Of course as soon as due diligence was used (encrypted drive, reasonable system administration, firewall, malware scanner if it is Windows), it should not be criminal anymore. But this will get people to finally think about what they have to do to ensure minimal security standards. About time.

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
  2. Companies not the Employees by pyr3 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The problem that I see with this is that government agencies (or corporations) aren't being penalized. I don't think that the employee can be blamed when the corporate policy allows the employee to have sensitive information on their laptop *and* take the laptop off-site.

    Let's face it. I'm sure *a lot* of employees don't even know much about encryption software, let alone which ones to use and how they work. I don't see the sense in blaming an employee that "should have known better" when it's possible that the company didn't provide the tools/training to allow employee to know what to do.

    That being said, the employee has some responsibility to bear as well. If they take it to a restaurant and accidentally leave it there, that's their fault. If the company *does* have a policy about encrypting private information and the employee doesn't follow it, then it's the employee's negligence. If the company says, "No private data offsite," and the employee leaves with it on his/her laptop. It's that employee's own fault.