Amidst all the talk of the transformative powers of Web 2.0 and Government 2.0, ensuring data privacy and security remains a major challenge for private and public sector actors. Case in point: the UK Government announced earlier today that it lost track of two disks holding over personal data on over 25million UK citizens. The lost data includes names, addresses, dates of birth, National Insurance numbers, and in some cases, bank details.

Now, unlike the opposition figures quotes in the aforementioned BBC piece, I’m no fear monger but cases such as the question “is our information ever secure?” I for one believe the answer is no. No one, in either the private or public sector, can guarantee 100% data security. We recently interviewed UK CIO John Suffolk and he echoed this view, noting that in a loosely federated world, providing a guarantee of end-to-end security is the ultimate challenge.

But confronting this challenge requires doing away with the Chicken Little perspectives on risk, and acknowledging that if data security can be guaranteed at 99.9%, that .1% will require a little bit of trial and error, of deploy and test rather than test and deploy.

And evidently, as the aforementioned UK example highlights, maybe sensitive data shouldn’t be passed around in intra-office mail. Then again, maybe it’s just a nice excuse to throw the culprits in jail.