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Editor's Blog: Lords above!
Government technophobia does none of us any favours

By Steve Ranger

Published: Wednesday 27 February 2008

It's been another week where silicon.com's Full Disclosure campaign has loomed large, with two pieces of news emphasising why I'm proud we have stuck to our guns on this one.

The whole area of data protection and data breaches has often seemed too complex for our famously techno-phobic MPs to grasp.

Of course, there're no easy votes in a data breaches law and no easy photo opportunity for any politician who might want to champion it - kissing servers isn't quite as appealing as kissing babies, I guess.

New exclusive:
The Naked CIO

Who can you trust with your personal data?

Still, data security is a complex problem - but one that we need to solve, and soon.

So, in the absence of much interest from our elected representatives it has, perhaps surprisingly, fallen to the House of Lords to champion reform in this area.

These unlikely heroes of data protection last year made a series of - to my mind - entirely sensible recommendations on data protection, including the introduction of a data breaches law - something we've been championing.

Their other suggestions included increasing resources for the police to deal with internet-based crime, and allowing victims of online card fraud to report to the police - rather than to the banks which seem reluctant to act in many cases.

Inevitably, all of this was ignored by the government. So in the past week the Lords have announced they are having another crack, with a new report this summer. I wish them luck and hope they get a better response this time round.

And it's not just politicians who are struggling with this issue. I fear that few chief executives realise the capacity of a data breach to hole their business below the waterline.

Over lunch the other day I got a preview of some research into UK data breaches that put the average cost of an incident at £1.4m per company - almost £50 per customer record compromised. That's plenty for any CEO, let alone CIO, to be worried about.

My fear is that it took a big data breach to bring this issue to the public consciousness. I don't want it to take another data breach - followed by identity thieves exploiting that lost data to rip off the unlucky public - before the government decides to act.

Editor's choice - three things you should check out on silicon.com this week:

Take a look at the latest of our exclusive columns from The Naked CIO - this week's subject is, fittingly, who can you trust with your personal information?

And check out Microsoft's Steve Ballmer talking about open source.

Try another piece of exclusive silicon.com content - the latest CIO Jury looks at the rise in the use of open source software in corporate IT systems.