Following the recent string of data losses by the government, no one seems to have taken on board the institutionalised data leaks which the government practises as part of its statutory liability.

What is the implication of openly publishing tens of thousands of names, addresses and dates of birth free of charge on the internet for any ID thief to easily pick up?

This is what happens to your details at Companies House if you are a company director, something that increasing numbers of people are becoming to find work as contractors in a shrinking employment market.

While it may be a statutory duty to gather such  information, and it may be perfectly valid to have such information to validate  people's IDs in the same way the same information is used to apply for credit cards, I can see no compelling reason why the  entire database needs to be dumped uncontrolled for anyone on the web to access unrestricted.

The forthcoming changes in the Companies Act only allow the address to be withheld, so even after these changes the director's full name and date of birth will be public, and can still easily be tied up with historic   electoral registers before the edited versions were introduced.

You reported that one person had accessed the name, address and phone number of another businesses'
details online at the PAYE site (HMRC blunder leads to further private data leak, www.computing.co.uk/2220558). The scale of openly publishing the private details of the directors of two million   limited companies in the UK is surely much more significant.

Company directors are not immune from ID theft, yet the government does nothing to protect their ID. Why not?

Craig Cockburn