Today, a portable hard-disk with personal data on 100,000 members of the British Armed Forces was mislaid or stolen (they don’t yet know) from government contractor EDS. The same company lost data on prison staff in September, previously records of other military personnel were stolen, and the names and addresses of millions of people claiming welfare benefits in the UK were lost from a government office in November 2007.

This kind of potential privacy breach is not confined to the UK and it is nothing new, laptops have been left on public transport, data has been copied, hacked and simply lifted physically from government and company offices for years. It is almost a decade since a British spy lost his laptop computer containing highly sensitive data and another had his stolen in broad daylight.

This serial incompetence seems to be ongoing and although officials claim to be addressing the issue, the one major problem with this kind of data loss that really ought to have been addressed at least ten years ago is to make sure all such sensitive data is encrypted. Yes, you heard right. The data on all these missing laptops, hard drives, and backup disks is in a format that anyone could read. It is not simply a case of blocking access to drives and folders with a password, the data has to be properly encrypted. Micro businesses and organizations seem to be more aware of this than national governments.

Encryption technology has been readily available for many years. It is getting easier to use – look at TrueCrypt – for instance. It is not known exactly what was on the latest disk drive to go missing, but as with all previous cases this simple technology was not being used to protect the data on portable storage media.

Ironic then that on the same day that EDS confesses to losing data on 100,000 military personnel, that a new study published in the International Journal of Electronic Business should reveal that men and women have the same privacy concerns as each other about using the internet, social media, and e-commerce, for instance. The study is related more to e-commerce than the loss of sensitive data by government officials, but it is that kind of incidence that affects how we all use and rely on new technology.

Silvana Faja of the Department of Computer Information Systems, at the University of Central Missouri, in Warrensburg and Silvana Trimi of the Management Department, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, point out that the privacy of personal information disclosed during e-commerce transactions continues to be an important issue for internet users.

Previous research indicates the existence of gender differences in privacy concerns online. However, little has been done to explore these differences in the context of various dimensions of privacy and their influence on purchasing behavior.

Faja and Trimi set out to study gender differences from two perspectives. First to see whether men or women – in a sample of college students aged 18-34 years – are more concerned with privacy. Secondly, to determine whether the concerns affect online purchasing behavior.

Their results show that female and male internet users actually have the same level of concern and both genders were equally worried about secondary use of the personal information they provide when buying online. There were some differences between whether individuals thought their data might be accessed improperly (succumb to hackers, in other words).

The results of this study may be an indication that gender differences in this aspect of attitude towards the internet are disappearing. As internet technology is becoming more pervasive and a more important part of our lives, users’ perceptions are also changing. In a broader context, other studies have found that gender gaps in computer attitudes and usage are diminishing. These results may indicate a narrowing gender gap among younger generations.

Of course, you can be as concerned as you like about privacy, but if you’re government is losing your personal records on your behalf, there’s almost no point! I’ll follow up this post with a brief review of the top desktop encryption tools very soon.

Silvana Faja, Silvana Trimi (2008). Privacy concerns in e-commerce: an empirical investigation of gender differences International Journal of Electronic Business, 6 (4), 386-404