The Scottish Ambulance Service has lost a disc containing the encrypted 999 call details of almost one million people.
The disc was reported lost last week by courier TNT, and had been mislaid earlier this month while in transit from the Emergency Medical Dispatch Centre in Paisley.
The Scottish Ambulance Service insisted there was little danger that people's 999 details could be exposed, as the disc had been encrypted.
"All the information on the disc was protected by a password and industry-standard encryption," stated the ambulance service on its website. "In addition, to further protect the information, all the information was scrambled so that it should not be possible to match any of the information against an individual. It would be extremely difficult for anybody to gain access to any meaningful information."
Details on the disc included a copy of the record of 894,629 calls made to the ambulance service in the West of Scotland since February 2006. The call data included the name of the caller and person they called on behalf of, the date of birth of the person called on behalf of, the location of the incident, and the phone number used to call for assistance. The names of the ambulance-service staff who dealt with the call, including the call taker, dispatcher and names of the responding crew, were also on the disc.
Talkback
By now the public are surely tired of these stories, there are just too many.
Am curious, how come before september 2007 there were no data breaches? Is it case that they were there but not reported as widely as they're now or is negligence a new epidemic raveging through the government?
It's not great that they're still losing disks, but that's almost impossible to prevent. At least if an encrypted disk gets lost, it's alomost b*****r all use to anyone who finds it - unless they've got access to a supercomputer and plenty of time on their hands.