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Ambulance service loses 999 details
Encrypted disc contains one million calls

By Tom Espiner

Published: Wednesday 25 June 2008

The Scottish Ambulance Service has lost a disc containing the encrypted 999 call details of almost one million people.

The disc was reported lost last week by courier TNT, and had been mislaid earlier this month while in transit from the Emergency Medical Dispatch Centre in Paisley.

The Scottish Ambulance Service insisted there was little danger that people's 999 details could be exposed, as the disc had been encrypted.

The ambulance service stated on its website: "All the information on the disc was protected by a password and industry-standard encryption. In addition, to further protect the information, all the information was scrambled so that it should not be possible to match any of the information against an individual. It would be extremely difficult for anybody to gain access to any meaningful information."

Details on the disc included a copy of the record of 894,629 calls made to the ambulance service in the West of Scotland since February 2006. The call data included the name of the caller and person they called on behalf of, the date of birth of the person called on behalf of, the location of the incident, and the phone number used to call for assistance. The names of the ambulance-service staff who dealt with the call, including the call taker, dispatcher and names of the responding crew, were also on the disc.