A year ago today Thanet Star reported that Thanet District Council (and others) had been told off over treatment of people's privacy. In Council Privicy Trashed Thanet Star mentioned that councils were being told to be clear to about which companies they were selling ellectrol roll data to.

I don't see any signs of this being implimented but worse yet Thanet District Council have become even more careless with people's privacy.

Take a trip to the gateway in Margate. Anyone with business to conduct there will need to take a ticket and wait. A recent visit took 45 minutes to file a signle scribbled note confirming in writting what every member of staff should have known full well (if they have ever spoken to me on the phone).

A recent change at the Gateway means that everyone knows the subject of your business. Tickets are devided into groups and ticket numbers now follow a letter number, number, number pattern. That letter tells you what the nature of the enquirey is.

I don't know about you but I feel that my business with TDC is between me and TDC and I don't especially feel the need to have everyone in the building know what I'm going to be addressing on each visit.

The potential for social engineering is incredible. If a fraudster wanted to target some of our more vulnerable inhabitants say those with council tax issues, benefits claims or housing needs they can quickly see who to home in on.

There is no need for showing the topic in the ticket number. That's just bad design. I could show you three different ways to run a ticket system with no leaked information at all.