In the US there is a legal requirement to state if public authorities suffer data breaches: this is not quite the case in the UK, so it is disturbing to discover that between April 2001 and April 2014 the UK's local government bodies suffered at least 4,236 data breaches according to this report by Big Brother Watch. The most recent one was on 22 March 2014, when an email from the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) revealed that more than half of all councils had been breached since 2010.
In the US there is a legal requirement to state if public authorities suffer data breaches: this is not quite the case in the UK, so it is disturbing to discover that between April 2001 and April 2014 the UK's local government bodies suffered at least 4,236 data breaches according to this report by Big Brother Watch. In two-thirds of the cases no disciplinary action of any sort was taken, and in only one case did the action result in a court case.