JAPAN DATA LEAKS THROUGH CARELESSNESS PUT WORKERS IN THE HOT SEAT asahi.com:Data leaks through carelessness put workers in the hot seat?-?ENGLISH You could be the next "victim"--accused of leaking sensitive data, through no fault of your own.

If you are one of the millions who regularly take home work from the office, and your personal computer is lost or stolen--as happened in October to one sales rep at a medical equipment maker--you could stand accused of leaking client data, a serious offense in this high-tech era.

For many people whose job involves using customer data, they have so much work to do that they routinely load files onto their personal laptops to finish up at home.

Most leaks of personal data result from theft and careless mistakes. It can happen to anyone. In October, a sales representative at Roche Diagnostics K.K., a medical diagnostic drug and equipment manufacturer, stopped to buy a drink from a vending machine on a train platform at JR Tokyo Station.

He set his bag down at his feet, but when he reached for it a few seconds later, it was gone.

Inside was a Roche laptop computer containing the names, addresses and phone numbers of 101 patients in Saitama Prefecture, along with their doctors' names, who were Roche customers. The computer also had a list of 140 health professionals in Nagano Prefecture, the names of the hospitals where they worked and the universities where they had graduated.

The patient information was meant to be used only at the company's offices.

Even though the Roche computers were all protected by several passwords that made it nearly impossible for an outsider to access the data, Roche employees visited all of people whose names were listed in the stolen computer to apologize, a Roche official said.

The company went public with the details a month later.

Laptop stolen along with anti-theft cable

In another instance, a computer was stolen in November from a back office at a nursing station in the ophthalmology department of Hiroshima University hospital. The computer contained information on 1,298 people who had been hospitalized there since October 2003.

The patient data included their addresses, gender, telephone numbers, type of surgery and notes on the results of treatment. The computer was stolen along with an anti-theft cable that had chained it to the desk.

What puzzled investigators was that many newer computers were in the front of the office. The one stolen was relatively old.

Jiro Makino, a lawyer specializing in computer crime, said: "Since the personal information protection law came into force (last April), it has become more difficult for thieves to access such information. The black market price for such data has soared from 10 yen per person to as much as 50 to 60 yen. People should realize that computer thieves are now targeting the data inside, not the hardware."

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