More bureaucrats, local and national, should have access to your personal information through data-sharing and data-matching between government databases, through access to your telephone and e-mail data, through the database behind a smart national identity card so the government claims. Expect to be labelled an impertinent troublemaker if you ask why.
There is, of course, a balance to strike between the government s claim to be doing all this in the public interest, the right to know and our right to privacy. But it s a balance weighted too far towards the government. This is not about right to know: not the public s right to know how it s being governed, for example (the point of the Freedom of Information Act) but bureaucrats and businesses right to ever more (and ever more private) information on millions of ordinary private citizens. That s why we now need a privacy act to protect us from unjustified snooping and misuse of our personal information.
What exactly is the entitlement/identity card for? It s been linked to a hatful of high-profile problems; but in reality, and at vast expense, it will tackle none of them effectively. Identity alone is almost never the issue, whether you re targeting terrorists, fraudsters, or illegal workers that s clear from even a cursory look at the facts. The obvious answer is that this government doesn t trust us and wants to hoard as much information on us as possible, so it has as many ways as possible of checking up on us, for virtually any reason it chooses.
It s an approach that treats all citizens as suspects. And yet a government that so obviously distrusts its citizens seems affronted that they show less than absolute trust in return. How dare we question its need for this information, or its ability and commitment to ensure that information is only used where absolutely necessary, for the best possible purposes, with no possibility of misuse? Tony Blair has noted that the great potential to make better use of personal information to deliver benefits to individuals and to society& will only be realised if people trust the way that public services handle their personal data. A recent poll by The Guardian shows 58 percent of people don t believe the government can be trusted to keep their personal data secure.
Still, you re always told that with nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. So you won t mind which researchers get your medical records, which investigators trawl through your financial records or communications data because they ve mismatched your identity with someone with a similar name. In 2001, the Information Commission reported nearly 9,000 complaints from the public about online privacy or the security of their personal data. Its independent research found three-quarters of people were very or quite concerned about the information that organisations store on them.
An audit last year found errors in 65 percent of records on the Police National Computer now being used as the basis for issuing Criminal Records Bureau certificates on employees. The ID card database, Mr Blunkett reassures us, will rest on the expertise of the Passport Agency (think passport summer backlog crisis) and the DVLA (which sold car owners details to a supermarket).
It s not just ID cards and e-mail data, though: we lead the world in numbers of CCTV cameras and facial recognition systems; we can track people s movements using the cell network of mobile telephones; we may put fingerprints, iris scans and other personal details on an entitlement card s chip ; and so on.
New technology increasingly threatens any individual s ability to keep their personal information to themselves. The law hasn t kept up with technological change from a time where privacy could be an assumed right, to a present where extensive intrusion is so easy that the right to privacy needs to be actively protected.
Ironically, given its bad press, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act is the nearest thing we have to a privacy law. Liberty lobbied for its introduction because it does, along with the Data Protection Act, provide some controls on the collection, retention and sharing of personal information. But both Acts failed to deal with threats to privacy in a logical or structured way, creating serious problems both for those subject to them and those, particularly police officers, who have to use them. Legal controls for the protection of privacy and even for the control of high-level surveillance remain hopelessly inconsistent.
We need to start again from first principles. People have a right to privacy, to live their lives without unnecessary intrusion. There are exceptions to this basic rule principally in terms of public interest justifications, for investigative journalism, for the police and agencies investigating crime, and so on. We need a privacy law to protect our personal information and to mark out clearly those exceptions and the necessary robust and independent safeguards.
The appetite (official and commercial) and technology for information-gathering on millions of people exists as never before. A law that pulls together the concepts of individual privacy, free expression and freedom of information can genuinely protect all of them and protect all of us from unjustified snooping by an over-zealous bureaucracy.