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Who guards the info-vaults?

Only those with something to hide have anything to fear.

That's the line often rolled out whenever "the powers that be" decide to increase their levels of surveillance or information gathering on the public.

Whether it's keeping track of phone calls, internet use, vehicle movement, fingerprint databases or just about anything where personal information is collected and collated for some supposedly important reason, we are told that our privacy is protected.

Unfortunately, that's a big fat lie.

One only has to look at how many times staff at the IRD, WINZ or other government departments have been caught disclosing or even selling our "securely held" data to parties with no right to it.

And now we have another appalling example of how much risk we face from the government's penchant for keeping us under thumb.

I refer to the revelations that (supposedly) highly confidential information from the ESR's DNA database has been leaked by an employee.

The database concerned carries the results of over 100,000 DNA tests and the leak occurs on the eve of a push to require mandatory DNA sampling of those charged or convicted of a crime.

In this particular case we can take some consolation from the fact that there's not a lot of value to a DNA sample but the fact that this breach occurred should be sounding warning bells within the general populous.

In an age where 2 million pages of data can be stored on a tiny 4GB USB drive and physically concealed on a person without attracting suspicion, we really ought to take any government's guarantees that our data they hold is safe with a grain of sand.

But it's not just deliberate theft that poses a danger to the privacy of those whose information is held by governments.

Take this blunder for example.

This is not the first time, nor will it be the last that human error unwittingly exposes sensitive information to public scrutiny.

And let's not forget the way that the Conficker worm was able to infiltrate government computer systems, including the health department. What if its payload had been designed to deliver that highly sensitive and private data to someone of evil intent?

Whenever a government collects data on its people, the assumption must be made that sooner or later that data will be leaked, left on a stolen laptop, accidentally placed on a website or similar.

For this reason alone, the public ought to be paying closer attention to just what information is obtained and held about them -- both overtly and covertly.

You see, it's not just those who have something to hide who have anything to fear... it's anyone who trusts a bunch of civil servants to protect their personal data from the prying eyes of hackers, the grubby hands of greedy employees or the bad practices and lack of diligence by bored staff.

And when the inevitable happens, ought those whose privacy is violated not be entitled to some form of compensation?

Do you think that governments do enough to keep the raft of sensitive data they hold on people safe?

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