09 June 2006

ID cards mean privacy compromised

It's not new, except that the producers of the data are government-backed but it does not help the government make their case for ID cards.
everything has its price. Last month, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the state-funded watchdog for personal data, published a report, What Price Privacy?. The title's question was answered with a price list of public-sector data: £17.50 for the address of someone who is on the electoral register but has opted out of the freely available edited version; £150 to £200 for a vehicle record held by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency; £500 for access to a criminal record. The private sector also leaks: £75 buys the address associated with a mobile phone number, and £750 will get the account details.

What's that got to do with ID cards, aren't they supposed to increase data security? At one level it is true that it will make it harder. But there is ample evidence [some of it collected in posts on this blog] that no system is foolproof and uncrackable. So Phil Booth's Titanic analogy seems apt: the Titanic was indeed a very robust design, but ...
Phil Booth, national coordinator for the campaign group No2ID, says ... "The problem is having all that data in one place, so it becomes trivially easy to compromise the system,"... He compares personal identity to the Titanic: "They are talking about linking all the watertight compartments, so if one is holed, you go to the bottom of the sea."

Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | When did we last see your data?:
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