The dangers of identity theft are very much in the news these days, with government departments in the UK taking the brunt of the criticism.

The most dangerous, to 25 million people, was the government revelation last month that two discs holding the compete UK child benefit database, had disappeared en route from HM Revenue & Customs via courier TNT to the National Audit Office.

Police are still on the search, Revenue & Customs has advised benefits recipients they "should remain watchful" of any funny business and its chairman has resigned, the Prime Minister has apologised, and several firms have admitted mistakes in handling the discs.

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) yesterday mentioned the incident as a "watershed" in making an official call for companies to do privacy impact assessments on employee and client data before developing new IT systems or changing the way they handle personal information.

It's something any business owner, courier service, or data holding body could easily do as a matter of course just to be sure the customers are not turned away by privacy fears.

The ICO has also launched an online handbook to help organisations, whether big or small, conduct such privacy impact assessments when making changes.

Timely indeed for yesterday came the news of two more major breaches. First the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency in Northern Ireland announced it had lost the personal details of 6,000 people on two discs after being sent to the agency's headquarters in Swansea via Parcelforce Worldwide.

A number of manufacturers had requested the unencrypted data with the registration marks, chassis number, make and colours of 7,685 vehicles and their owners' names and addresses.

Meanwhile Sefton Primary Care Trust yesterday admitted sending staff details out to four private medical organisations, including their dates of birth, National Insurance numbers, salary and pension details.

The companies were putting in bids for services within the trust. The companies have now promised to destroy the information after Unite union called for an investigation.

The ICO handbook on privacy audits for organisations is available here: http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/pia_handbook_html/html/1-intro.html

A separate guide for young people is available here: http://www.ico.gov.uk/youth.aspx. A survey of Britons aged 14-21 revealed that two thirds accept people they don't know as 'friends' on social networking sites and over half leave parts of their profile public specifically to attract new people.

Data breaches are not confined to the UK of course. For a chronology of some of the public ones that occur in the US go to http://www.privacyrights.org/ar/ChronDataBreaches.htm.

One of the latest, recorded on December 5, details that Memorial Blood Centers (Duluth, MN) lost a laptop computer holding 268,000 donor records, including donor name in combination with the Social Security number.

On the internet, privacy has always been a concern. Remember a survey, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and released earlier this month, which revealed that internet users will reveal more personal information online if they believe they can trust the organisation that requests the information.

"Even people who have previously demonstrated a high level of caution regarding online privacy will accept losses to their privacy if they trust the recipient of their personal information" says Adam Joinson, who led the study.

Microsoft yesterday released its first major update 'Service Pack 1' for Office 2007. Download it at the Microsoft Office update site at http://office.microsoft.com.

If you missed any individual fixes since Office 2007 was launched almost a year ago then you need to download the pack. Included is a patch for an Excel calculation bug, security changes for Communicator and an improvement to Outlook's performance when handling large PST files.

If you already have upgrade Office through the automatic Microsoft update system then ignore this message.

Pack are usually intended for businesses that might want to update in one go.

If you have any comments send them to Ahmed at elamin.ahmed[AT]gmail.com.