"Reduce your risk; only store what you really need"

I'm going to blog about Andy blogging because it's a great post making some valid points and I cannot put it any better!

So here is the link.

The article from The Register that Andy links to, 'Investigators uncover dismal data disposal' by Lucy Sherriff, is one I hadn't seen before and shows how easily disposal of data can be mishandled.

For me one of the best quotes from Dfes with regard to schools holding biometric data is:-

"They are well used to handling all kinds of sensitive information to comply with data protection and confidentiality laws."

Schools have historically failed here; a forensic computer science faculty bought hard drives off ebay, and extracted school records: [see link...]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/17/hard_drive_data/

A colleague also told me recently how he took a school computer out of a skip...Personally I don't condemn the schools here after all their primary focus is on education and not on securing personal information.