The national media has, unsurprisingly, been full of politicians and commentators calling for the identity cards and NHS electronic records programmes to be reviewed or even scrapped, in light of the outbreaks of “lost” data caused by the missing HM Revenue and Customs CDs.

Shadow home secretary David Davis wrote in The Sunday Times that “we need serious restrictions on the transfer and sharing of such information. The current casual and careless practice is intolerable.”

There is no doubt that Davis is right on this point of principle, and the debate over the security of government databases is a vital one.

But let’s think carefully about some of the facts. Patient records were lost by nine NHS trusts ­each of which no doubt had different IT and processes in place to cater for data protection. In one case, the records lost were paper-based.

The problem with the lost 25 million child benefit records is not with the database, it was that technology was not better used to protect it.

Secure file transfer and encryption are available ­ the problem was the lack of management controls and processes over the use of that data.

There is a strong technical counter argument to the anti-database cries ­ most of these issues have come as a result of a lack of management control and a patchwork of unco-ordinated databases.

And as we spend more time online, a standardised system for electronic personal identity management in our dealings with government ­ and even the private sector ­ is surely inevitable, whatever form it takes.

The goal is a system that gives each of us the ability to personally manage our electronic identity ­ an individual firewall around all the data that matters to you. That technology does not yet exist in the mainstream, but offers a vision of a secure future. Whatever the government does now should be seen as steps on that path.

The political rights and wrongs of ID cards or electronic patient records is a different debate.

The argument must not be about whether databases should exist. The objective is to make sure that secure, better managed and well-controlled databases exist.

What do you think? Read my blog at: http://editor.computing.co.uk