BIG BANK, HSBC said it lost a disc containing details on 370,000 of its insurance customers.
HSBC Holdings said the disc was lost about a month ago after it was handed to a courier.
The bankers and the courier firm - the name of which was not disclosed - have had a good ferret around down the back of their sofas, as have those at the re-insurance firm to which the disc was supposed to be sent. No-one has yet found the disc.
The bank said the disc contained names, birth dates and details of insurance coverage which mostly related to mortgages. No personal addresses were on the disc, it said
HSBC said it had alerted Britain's Financial Services Authority about the loss and would tell those affected too. It said the disc was password protected. ยต
Bring the stocks back for CEOs of UK organisations, public and private sector, who do not clamp down on the mid-80s practise of dumping OUR data to non-encrypted physical media and then handing it over to a courier to lose.

A week in the stocks on Hyde Park Corner should be long enough for them not to forget how foolish their organisation has been for at least a couple of weeks.
Must really excite you Paul... with all those typos and spelling errors. Maybe should use Vista and Office 2007 to take care of this for you...
*yawn*.... unfortunately this is starting to become so common it's not news anymore.. :(

It fits more in the category "in other news":

...in other news the milkman dropped a case of milk bottles

...in other news at the Tasmania Zoo another bengalese tiger baby was born

... in other news youtube was served with a bogus DMCA notice

...in other news HSBC lost a few more customer records

...in other news MicroSoft takes over the International Organization for Standardization, which is known from now on as just another division of Microsoft

and so on...
should have bought an emc centera.
I guess everyone sending data out should use some type of GPS tracking device to find out what route their data has gone through. So should all government laptops with sensitive data in addition to strong encryption a dose of GPS tracking will help trace loss laptops.
http://www.fujifilmusa.com/JSP/fuji/epartners/TDSDCS_TapeTracker.jsp