Some facts: a whopping 8,500 laptops are left in UK airports every year. And Londoners alone sloppily left 5,000 laptops in taxis over a six-month period.

Norwich Union was fined a record £1.26m yesterday for exposing seven million people to fraud, from which fraudsters made £3.3m from policy holders. Nationwide Building Society was fined £980,000 this year after one of its laptops was lost with 11 million customers’ data contained on the desktop. And M&S is another high-profile offender.

People make mistakes. That’s undeniably a fact. So, the news today that yet more data entrusted to the government has gone missing is not really a surprise. In this instance, following the disappearance of two CDs containing 25 million child benefit claimants’ personal details, a further three million names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of learner drivers have been lost.

This time the details were in the possession of a third party private contractor in Iowa, USA, and went AWOL seven months ago. Somewhat reassuringly, on this occasion, the transport secretary Ruth Kelly has insisted there was no financial information, National Insurance numbers, dates of birth or driving licence numbers contained on the disc.

With identity theft rife – you are advised to shred any envelope addressed to you at your home address, remove personal details from Facebook, and watch closely for scammers on eBay and unusual activity in our bank accounts – we live in worrying times.

In the past three months I have attempted to sell an electronic item on eBay to a UK bidder only to have my auctions ruined by fraudulent bidders using members’ dormant accounts from the US, Nigeria and France.

It seems eBay is powerless to stop them and in each case I have lost genuine bidders prepared to pay a fulsome price, with the value of the item depreciating with every attempt. Fortunately, that’s the extent to which I’ve been hit so far by identity theft and have lost nothing, bar good bidders.

So what’s to be done? It’s a tricky one, but the most obvious, and boringly predictable answer is to implement policy and process and ensure you give your staff with the right equipment, with the necessary security features. If you get your house in order, we all stand a better chance of retaining our identities.

Ask yourself this: do any of your staff travel around with customers’ personal details on their devices? Or, do you contract out any work where you share data and haven’t checked how your third party partner will protect it? While we all rail against the government’s cock-ups and are quick to criticise it’s worth remembering that we might be just as guilty, albeit on a far smaller scale. After all, in both cases of CDs disappearing the government had contracted out responsibility.

With a desire and ability to have members of staff filling dead time on the move by working on their laptops, Palms, BlackBerrys or other devices, the chances are they will wander around with data vital to your business and valuable to your customers.

The latest laptops come with finger print recognition and something called Trusted Platform Module (TPM), which encrypts your data. Assuming you don’t want your mobile staff to sit chatting, drifting off to the sounds from their iPod, or idly reading the latest thriller during work hours, you need to consider your role in all this – or risk it all.