Recently, the loss of penalty tickets by police officers has occurred twice in three days, causing the leak of personal information of more than ten ticketed drivers. This has aroused public concern about the measures police officers take to protect private information and to prevent similar incidents from happening again. Do we really have to use high-tech services like RFID to protect personal data on penalty tickets?

From an IE perspective, Poka Yoke is frequently used. Poka-Yoke is a mechanism to eliminate human errors to prevent defects from happening. The concept originated from the production of Toyota cars and was known globally through industrial quality management promotion. Its purpose is to ensure the correct operation of workers with no requirements on workers’ attention, experiences or professional knowledge. For example, the use of the red, green and yellow areas can clearly divide the “fail”, “pass” and “work in process” areas respectively.

In the privacy leakage incident, what Poka-Yoke method can we use? Common practices are to use a neck chain to hold the penalty tickets or place a brightly-coloured ribbon on the penalty ticket book. This is the same theory as people using a neck chain to hold their octopus card to prevent loss of card. If we observe and think more, IE tools can be applied in daily life frequently.