28th January marks the 4th European Data Protection
Day, a "celebration" marking the anniversary of the first
European convention relating to data protection. The US and Canada
are also marking 28 January as Data Privacy Day, although as yet,
neither our American counterparts nor ourselves have gone so far as
to proclaim a public holiday!
This time last year, the occasion offered little optimism about
the effectiveness of data protection measures here in the UK: the
Information Commissioner's Office issued a "Personal
Information Promise" to organisational heads and government
departments to ensure they raised awareness of data protection
issues in their workplaces. It is difficult to see that this
measure had any impact - the ICO announced yesterday that 818 data
security breaches were reported over the last two years, with the
two most common causes of breaches being the loss or theft of data
or hardware.
