The government has admitted that they have lost the personal records of 25 million people after two discs containing the information that were sent out from HM Revenue & Customs did not reach their destination.

This is a pretty big mistake but we shouldn't be under any illusion that smaller mistakes like this aren't happening all the time. No one really has any tabs on the amount of personal data floating about or who has access to it. My earlier post about data protection highlights that we as individuals need to better understand our relationship to the information that is held about us.

Until then I'd suggest the government cannot be trusted to run an ID card scheme....