Britain's Privacy Breach

On November 22, 2007, Gordon Rayner and Andrew Porter reported in the Telegraph:

Two compact discs containing bank details and addresses of 9.5 million parents
and the names, dates of birth and National Insurance numbers of all 15.5 million
children in the country went missing after a junior employee of HM Revenue and
Customs put them in the post, unrecorded and unregistered.

Today, the Telegraph reports that even more British citizen's privacy and identities have been compromised:

... since the loss of the HMRC discs came to light, "quite a number of
organisations, both public and private sector, have come to us saying that they
think they have found a problem... almost on a confessional basis, bringing to
our attention problems they have encountered with security in their own
organisations".

And Andrew Porter reports in the Telegraph today that witness protection program participants have also had their real identities compromised:

The missing data discs are understood to contain both the real names and the new
identities of up to 350 people who have had their identities changed after
giving evidence against major criminals.

Passport Privacy Breach

Canadian citizens have been exposed to privacy breaches and possible identity theft through their passport website - Passport Canada, according to a report on the Toronto Globe & Mail:

... The breach was discovered last week by an Ontario man completing his own passport application. He found he could easily view the applications of others by altering one character in the Internet address displayed by his Web browser.
"I was expecting the site to tell me that I couldn't do that," said Jamie Laning of Huntsville. "I'm just curious about these things so I tried it, and boom, there was somebody else's name and somebody else's data."

That data included social insurance numbers, driver's licence numbers and addresses.

Also available were home and business phone numbers, a federal ID card number and even a firearms licence number....