WRITTEN ON December 7th, 2007 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Data nitwittery, Foundation of Trust, What do we want?
The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) has admitted it sent confidential details to the wrong motorists by mistake….earlier this week it sent out 1,215 questionnaires including drivers’ names, addresses, birth dates, licence numbers and motoring offences records. The agency said at least 100 people who have been affected have got in touch. Officials said they did not know exactly how many people had been affected but a dedicated telephone line had been set up.
The DVLA admitted that “human error” had led to the “isolated incident”.
“Isolated” in the sense, I suppose, that all the other recently reported data leaks happened in different parts of the country – Washington (HMRC) and wherever the DWP is headquartered (Ashton under Lyne I guess). Still, at least these are on paper, and one at a time, as opposed to enormous power and value of the mislaid HMRC discs.
The DVLA admitted that “human error” had led to the “isolated incident”.
Human systems are interesting. I hear that the human error checking system within DWP (who has had similar problems with wrong mail in wrong envelopes) consisted of a very junior contractor checking that there was indeed a letter in the top, bottom, and somewhere-in-the-middle envelopes of a multi-thousand mailing, but NOT actually checking whether the name and address on the envelope matched the name and address on the letter…