What’s the worst thing you’ve ever lost? Your keys? Your wallet? Your phone? What about the personal details of an entire Japanese city of more than 450,000 people?
Not that last one? Then you’re doing better than a man in Amagasaki, northwest of Osaka, who transferred data on almost half a million people to a USB stick, went out drinking after work, and promptly lost his bag and the thumb drive with it.
The worker in his 40s, who is (or possibly was) employed by a company that provides benefits to tax-exempt households, passed out in the street after spending hours drinking at a restaurant and woke up to find his precious cargo nowhere in sight.
Embarrassingly, the stick contained not only names, addresses, and birthdates of every resident of Amagasaki, but also details such as bank account numbers, social security benefits, and tax information.
Though city officials have made a grovelling apology for the incident, there is some good news: the drive is encrypted and password-protected, and there haven’t been any reports of anyone trying to access the data yet.
We must admit it does make us feel a little better about all the umbrellas we’ve left on the bus over the years.
