Guardian Unlimited Technology: Why doesn't government ask me how much of my data it can share?

[Tracey P. Lauriault-2]

tracey spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited Technology site and thought you should see it.

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Why doesn't government ask me how much of my data it can share?
Michael Cross
Thursday September 21 2006
The Guardian


According to the Mail on Sunday, the Germans plan to bug our wheelie bins. Immediately, I alert the Crouch End home guard to be on the lookout for pickelhaubed waste collection operatives. None so far: but when they come, by golly we'll be ready. Disappointingly, reading beyond the headline reveals that the "bugs" are RFID identity tags and that the Germans are blameless apart from manufacturing the things. The people behind the plan, supposed to pave the way for charging for rubbish collections, are local authorities. (Mainly Conservative-controlled ones, which doesn't stop the Mail's readers blaming New Labour.)

By now, though, we've moved on to the following week's panic - the Department for Education's plans for a children's index. We nattering classes are all in favour of this kind of measure, until we realise that it applies to our own children, too.

We're still marshalling our outrage when Big Brother strikes again: Middlesbrough has equipped its CCTV cameras with loudspeakers to tick off antisocial types in the street. Again, a great idea - until we're at the receiving end.

With feelings on privacy running high and esteem of government running low, this is not a brilliant time for ministers to announce that they want public bodies to be more enthusiastic about passing our personal details around. Hence the low key launch last week of a modest "vision statement" on the subject.

Despite the usual drivel about "delivering" public services and "alternative approaches to improving outcomes", the 12-page PDF from the Department for Constitutional Affairs is a fairly easy read.

The message is that public bodies already share a certain amount of data, but that if they shared more they would be much better at supporting those who get the worst deal from our society, and at making life more convenient for the rest of us.

So far, so good. The vision has two big flaws, however. First, it does not identify the current barriers to data sharing, or what it intends to do about them. All we get is "the Data Protection Act must not be used to justify unnecessary barriers to sharing information". In fact, the act is only one of several tiers of law and constitutional convention that can stop one arm of the state from routinely passing on personal information to another.

There is also the common law duty of confidentiality and the small print in statutes setting out exactly what powers bodies like local authorities enjoy. In several places the vision statement says "legislation may be needed" but does not say what such legislation will entail. This does not inspire confidence.

The second flaw lies in the one substantive suggestion aimed at building trust in the process. Ministers assume that most people (even Mail readers) will trust government to share data so long as they can see what's being shared. Yet the only step in the direction of transparency is couched in vague hypothesis. "We will be exploring how we might provide citizens with more information about which public sector bodies hold information and what they use it for."

Note that word "might". It is pathetic. And at this stage in the modernising government programme, we should be doing a sight more than "exploring".

The statement should be changed to read: "We will provide citizens with all necessary details about which public sector bodies hold information and what they use it for. Citizens will have the option to decide with which public bodies their information is shared."

There are two reasons to get this bit right now. One, as I've said, is trust. The second, as the vision statement admits, is accuracy. Long experience has shown that the way to maintain accurate data is to put the data subject in charge. And if government data isn't accurate, there's not much point in sharing it anyway.

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