UK bank laptop stolen with 11m customer records

daveewart writes: BBC News reports that the UK Building Society Nationwide has admitted that an laptop containing account records of more than 11 million customers has been stolen from an employee's home. This story raises a number of worrying questions: The theft happened three months ago, why has the news only just been made public? Why was it possible (indeed, why was it necessary at all) to put data relating to their entire customer base on to an employee's laptop stored at an employee's home? Why was the information on the laptop not encrypted?