Wednesday 25 March 2009

A Quarter Of Labour's Databases 'Illegal'


It comes to something when the Guardian are reporting on conclusions from the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust. They really are taking their sponsorship of the Convention on Modern Liberty seriously, it seems.

Right to privacy broken by a quarter of UK's public databases, says report

A quarter of all the largest public-sector database projects, including the ID cards register, are fundamentally flawed and clearly breach European data protection and rights laws, according to a report published today.

Claiming to be the most comprehensive map so far of Britain's "database state", the report says that 11 of the 46 biggest schemes, including the national DNA database and the Contactpoint index of all children in England, should be given a "red light" and immediately scrapped or redesigned.

The lefty bible is tending to pick and choose the liberties it wishes to defend at the moment, and the CiFers may take a while to jump on board, but at least it's a start. Couldn't be anything to do with their downward spiralling advertising revenues, could it?

How weep-inducing is it that the Rowntree report is proffering hope for Libertarians, that an authoritarian collection of nutjobs at the EU, is our only chance of halting the runaway excesses of our police-state obsessed Labour government.




3 comments:

Unknown said...

This comes as no great surprise, it's about time that someone actually spoke up about it.

What did surprise me recently was the idea that they are looking to get the data from the social networking sites. This appears to be flawed on so many levels. Here's a couple.

IF the guv wants that data, we must be informed that the data and our 'movements' within that site will be monitored and sent to a third party. We would have to agree to this before they can send our data anywhere (think of the little tick boxes on any site that you sign up to)

IF the guv wants the data from the UK they would have to find a way of separating the UK participants from the rest of the world on aforementioned sites. There probably could be some way of doing this by looking where you sign on from. However, by the same token, any good IT person can probably find a way around this. They cannot take data from a participant in another country. In fact, I would really enjoy sitting back and watching the fireworks if they tried. We may think that we have strict DP rules but other countries are even more strict.

Possibly another good example of someone not practising their joined up thinking again? They actually pay people to come up with these stupid ideas and then publish them before they think them through?????

Or maybe it is just me who is the stupid one for expecting them to follow the same rules as the rest of us.

Anonymous said...

I don't see why the government persists with such stupid ideas anyway when it would be so much easier and cheaper to simply tatoo us all with barcodes. Oh wait, Liam Lardarse hasn't thought of it yet..

banned said...

I was chatting to a German Police Officer the other day, his opinion was that Germanys own constitution would make most of our tsunami of snooping stuff illegal, regardless of what the EU or Human Rights might have to say.
Who gave Germany her constitution ? We did, post WW2.