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Data for 3 million UK driving candidates lost

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Monday, December 17, 2007

Some personal details of 3 million British learner drivers who had applied for the 'theory test' component of their Driving licence have been lost in Iowa, in the USA.

The data was lost on a hard drive that was owned by Pearson Driving Assessments Ltd, a private contractor to the UK driving standards agency.

Details were given by the UK Transport Secretary, Ruth Kelly, in the House of Commons at 1730 UTC yesterday. It is the first major loss of data in the UK since information on 25 million people was lost by HM Revenue in October.

In her statement to MPs, Ruth Kelly confirmed that no banking information was contained within the lost data, nor were individuals' dates of birth. She highlighted that security measures had been taken, and that the information that had been stored was not in a format "readily usable or accessible" by standard means.

Political figures in the UK continue to raise concerns about both the specific loss of this information, and the nature of governments ability to safely gather and maintain information. Susan Kramer, representing the Liberal Democrats stated "This constant attempt to gather data, to get more data, to know more about you, to link it more together, all of that it seems to me is what comes into question."

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This page is archived, and is no longer publicly editable.
Articles presented on Wikinews reflect the specific time at which they were written and published, and do not attempt to encompass events or knowledge which occur or become known after their publication.

Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.

Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.

Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.

The text of this article is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License
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