GE Money representatives officially announced on Friday that a backup tape containing the personal data of 650,000 customers has been reported missing since October2007 from an Iron Mountain storage facility. According to Iron Mountain representatives, no personal data appears to have been compromised so far, and this could just be a case of misplacement.

An Iron Mountain statement says: “We believe this is an unfortunate case of misplaced tape; there has been no evidence to suggest that the media was obtained by unauthorized persons or has been misused in any way. We also understand the tape was created in such a manner to make unauthorized access extremely unlikely and difficult, even for experts with specialized knowledge and technology.”

Well, now we can certainly rest assured no data has been compromised… However, in the light of the events, Richard Jones, spokesman for the General Electric Co unit said the consumers have been notified by letter of the situation and the individuals whose Social Security numbers were on the tape will be provided with a 12-month free credit monitoring service.

Iron Mountain discharges the identity theft as a problem: “it is distinctly different from previous cases of malicious hacking or PC theft. Since we notified GE Money of the missing backup tape in October, there has been no evidence to suggest that any person’s identity has been compromised as a result. And we don’t know of any incident, ever, when a lost backup tape has resulted in identity theft.”

In the meantime, 230 national retailers have been affected by the “misplacement”, including J.C. Penney Co., and wait for the situation to be solved. If the tape falls into the wrong hands, the Social Security numbers could be used to create false credit-card accounts, in other words, the situation could fall into identity theft, but for the time being, officials say there is nothing to worry about.