SIR - Identify theft is a 21st-century growth industry and your story about the stolen laptop containing employees' details (Worcester News, February 24) is alarming.

But this is one danger of the digital age not confined to the Faithful City or its county council. The mechanisms by which massive amounts of data can be held in such a small space leaves us all vulnerable.

In the old days of paper filing, it might take a warehouse full of records to accommodate the amount of data now held on one hard disk or even a DVD. What can now be whipped-away on a laptop might then have taken a container lorry to transport.

The stolen data can now so easily be copied, hidden and distributed. It will probably prove impossible to completely secure large amounts of public information. Any malicious person with access to the data could abuse it. The new NHS medical records database may well become a victim in due course. It will contain deeply personal records on almost everyone. It would certainly be of interest to identity thieves and, as the NHS is Europe's largest employer, there is always at least some possibility of a rotten apple in the barrel who might abuse the system.

While Government ministers promote the efficiency of the digitisation of databasing of our lives, we are becoming as much victims of technology rather than beneficiaries. For all the convenience, we are slowly losing our personal privacy and security. Even the humble supermarket loyalty card enables huge databases to be compiled and our buying preferences to be assessed. We have perhaps passively sold out on the notion of privacy.

It might be time for the nation to think about how we can effectively preserve some security of personal information because, if it so easy for identity thieves to purloin private records then what about records that affect not only personal, but national security too. This is a new dark age for privacy.

Andrew Brown, Worcester.