data protection

The UK health service's IT agency Connecting for Health has admitted it has no idea how many of nearly 400,000 smartcards giving healthcare staff access to patient records have been lost or stolen. This is a major threat to personal data, to civil liberties and it shows the stupidity of building vast, centralised comuter ssytems at great cost (and waste), when smaller, more local systems oculd do a better job more cheaply and with less environmental impact. Green does not mean being anti technology, it means being pro appropriate technology.