Tinfoil Hat Time

[bluemonday]

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[Cronky]

Here, at last, is what Westimster MP's think of the Surveillance Society:

 

House of Commons Home Affairs Committee Report

 

Summary

In the design of its policies and systems for collecting data, the Government should adopt a principle of data minimisation: it should collect only what is essential, to be stored only for as long as is necessary.

 

We call on the Government to give proper consideration to the risks associated with excessive surveillance. Loss of privacy through excessive surveillance erodes trust between the individual and the Government and can change the nature of the relationship between citizen and state. The decision to use surveillance should always involve a publicly-documented process of weighing up the benefits against the risks, including security breaches and the consequences of unnecessary intrusion into individuals’ private lives.

 

Our Report sets out a series of ground rules for Government and its agencies to build and preserve trust. Unless trust in the Government’s intentions in relation to data collection, retention and sharing is carefully preserved, there is a danger that our society could become a surveillance society.

 

The potential for surveillance of citizens in public spaces and private communications has increased dramatically over the last decade, making it possible for what the Information Commissioner calls “the electronic footprint” we leave in our daily lives to be built up into a detailed picture of our activities. This has prompted growing concern about a wide range of issues relating to the collection and retention of information about individuals.

 

The commercial sector has driven a great many of the developments in this area, recognising the competitive advantage that information about customers can bring when used to target marketing and design personalised services.

 

Government has also sought to harness this capability, to meet public expectations for similarly tailored and convenient services. Advances in technology have influenced the public’s ideas about what it can deliver for the prevention and investigation of crime. The outcome has been the collection and sharing of increasing amounts of personal information.

 

The collection of personal information by public and private sector bodies can have clear benefits for the consumer, the patient and the recipient of public sector services. But it also involves significant risk. Mistakes in or misuse of databases can cause substantial practical harm to individuals—particularly those who have little awareness of or control over how their information is used.

 

The Government should make full use of technical means of protecting personal information and preventing unwarranted monitoring of individuals’ activities. But safeguards are as much a matter of policy and protocol as of technology: the Government should also carry out rigorous risk analysis of any proposal to establish major new databases or other systems for collecting data, take full responsibility for protecting personal information, and ensure that its policies and procedures in relation to data collection and storage are as transparent as possible.

 

We examined aspects of the Home Office’s responsibilities in relation to the collection and sharing of personal information—including CCTV or video surveillance, identity cards and the National DNA Database—and considered how information collected in other public and private sector databases might be shared for use in the fight against crime. We recommend that the Home Office exercise restraint in collecting personal information, and address the question of whether or not surveillance activities represent proportionate responses to threats of varying degrees of severity.

[jimbms]

Accidental exposure of an ID card data strip to a ring magnet for 30 seconds works wonders for data privacy

[manshimajin]

Golly, these things will soon have as much data on us as Tesco does...

[thebees]

Its beyond a joke, I phoned to renew my car insurance - quite easy, my car, my home address, my debit card....oh nooooes, one must identify myself first, but why? "How many people fraudulently renew someone elses insurance?" says I, Data protection I'm told....its a whole pile of rubbish, I am quite looking forward to a time when people have less time on their hands to come up with these idiot ideas.

 

Why should I give the stranger on the end of the phone any of my details? he knows who I am but I don't know him and saying he works for an insurance company/bank/security firm etc etc doesn't make him trustworthy.

[Cronky]

And then there is the deal being struck with the Yanks to snoop on our internet browsing history:

 

FBI ready to demand detailed logs of Britons' internet and travel habits

 

The EU is close to finalising an agreement with the US that would allow the FBI to see the internet browsing habits and credit card histories of UK citizens.

and

Another area of concern relates to what 'appropiate safeguards' have been agreed to prevent the US authorities from requesting further information such as the religion, political opinion and 'sexual life' of a British resident.

[Albert Tatlock]

and

Another area of concern relates to what 'appropiate safeguards' have been agreed to prevent the US authorities from requesting further information such as the religion, political opinion and 'sexual life' of a British resident.

Makes you wonder what already goes there as 'routine'. Remember the Driving Standards Agency’s loss of 3 million driving licence records in the U.S? - which surely begs the question, 'why were the records in the US in the first place?' Even if UK work at the Driving Standards Agency’s was being undertaken by a US firm operating in the UK - surely data security and data transmission should have been part of the work agreement?

[manshimajin]

It makes one wonder how on earth we managed in the past - was the British Empire based on a mountain of ID cards?

 

My suspicion is much of this is happening because of computers - nowadays we can store infinite amounts of data so instead of some sensible person saying "why don't we save money and NOT store much at all" a bunch of poorly educated, play it safe, people are saying "if we can have this data maybe we'll need some of it one day so let's store it all". Of course data has its place but things seem to be going crazy by opting to keep everything rather than being rigourously selective.

 

There is a supermarket in Germany that uses your Store ID Card to get the shelves to talk to you as you walk around "Herr Schmidt you have not bought dog food for a whole month and we have a special on this week" and houses in S.Korea (not N.Korea) that remind you to take your umbrella with you because the weather forecast is for rain... (the ones in N.Korea probably just inform the secret police you are going out).

 

What happened to individual common sense - or the right to have none...

 

I think I am going to change my signature to Grumpy Old Man....how do I do that on the computer.......