the data has been offered for sale online. Means someone has it who is willing to sell it. What kind of retards think they only have one copy? Once it is online, it is never going to not be online ever again.

Idiots.

cos she couldn't recover it once it became data online either.

"The company said it had made every effort to get the data back"...

Even if they do, I heard it could be possible nowadays for the crooks to have made a *copy* of all the data. Could someone more technologically au fait please confirm?

... I'm a T-Mobile subscriber whose contract is due to end next week. For the last three months I've been being spam-called at least once per day by people trying to sell me a new phone contract. T-Mobile have clearly "shared" my end-date with lots of companies.

Either that, or Vodafone have, knowing I left them 18 months ago.

"The company said it had made every effort to get the data back"

Er... that makes it better then. Even if they had succeeded, what's to say it wouldn't have been duplicated and sent to just about every criminal gang who wants it?

... if you have an ID CARD!

Form an orderly queue, please. No pushing.

"Although the records had been offered for sale online, no one had bought them". Is this a quotation from T-Mobile... it's not in quotation marks? Is it an editorial comment... if so, how do you know?

Nobody cares about your personal data any more. Companies all over the place are storing their data on unencrypted laptops or posting it on unencrypted tapes/CDs. I used to work for a company that looks after the pensions for a number of police forces and while they had (pretty lax) security around the rack containing the data they had no controls on people making copies over the network to their laptops, ipods, etc. This company holds pension data (including the full set of personal information) for customers of the Pru and most of the civil service pensions schemes run for the Met Police, NHS etc.

This is largely because they believe that promoting people on "time served" rather than ability is a good idea and have got senior "technical" staff who think that having 17 firewalls which are all using outdated software (and have no support contract) is better than having two that are actively managed.

They not the only ones, I am with orange and the same thing happens, that said i can normally get a very nice line rental discount off these companies as they are working on commission from the phone companies and dont tend to care about lowering there profits :) works for me.

They won't be charged with anything, as there was no criminal intent... makes me feel much better! :)

PS - I know this is Germany, not the UK, but telecom's companies getting away with giving people's private info away is the same in any country.