The Tokyo police lost the personal data of 38 citizens. Together with floppy disks

As you know, Japan is a classic country of high technology, robots and artificial intelligence. Therefore, when someone says that important data has been lost there, we imagine an attack by hackers from the DPRK or a direct hit of a tsunami into a supercomputer. But it turned out that in the Land of the rising sun everything is much simpler and even "lampier". Recently, the Tokyo police just lost media with information, and even what!

When it became known that employees of one of the Tokyo police departments had lost the data of 38 citizens, not everyone understood what the problem was. In fact, why not just run a database search to pinpoint the exact location of the data they are trying to find? But not everything is so simple. The lost files are not in the database, because they are stored on floppy disks.

No, there is no mistake here – in the most advanced country in the field of IT, information can be stored on floppy disks in the old-fashioned way. Japan is a country of contrasts. The Japanese cannot live without new gadgets, but at the same time they support the policy of "not broken-don't-fix-it". Simply put, if something works, then no one will refuse this technology.

So this time, the data in 2021 was provided in a format that was outdated more than ten years ago. At the same time, the information was lost not just in the department of domestic squabbles. It was a serious section of countering organized crime. Fortunately, the outdated media contained information about 38 men aged 20 to 89 who applied for municipal housing in the Meguro district in Tokyo.

Meguro authorities provided the floppy disks to the police for verification. This is a common practice and the task of law enforcement officers was to check whether the applicants were not connected with the Yakuza. It is not known whether these were 5.25 or 3.5-inch floppy disks, and this is no longer essential. Both formats, to put it mildly, are not relevant in 2021.

This is how the head of Section 3 on combating Organized Crime, Hiroshi Miyamoto, commented on the incident. He also expressed hope that the data will not be used to harm their owners.

It's funny, but another world leader in technology cannot escape from the captivity of junk. In the USA, they still haven't parted with 8-inch floppy disks, which were obsolete in the late 80s.