"Suppose you became a celebrity," young people were asked in a recent Royal Academy of Engineering project: "How much of what you've put on Facebook would you be happy to see in the newspapers?" For most of the youngsters this question was an eye-opener, says Martyn Thomas, a software consultant and visiting Oxford professor who took part.
Recent months have seen a steady drip of stories about the risks to many and rewards to a few of data sharing. Last week Information Commissioner Richard Thomas (no relation) warned that a proposed Home Office-sponsored database tracking every phone call, text, email and internet use in the UK would "threaten the British way of life." The database is included in a draft data communications bill planned for the autumn legislative session.
But the private sector is busy too. In the US last year Viacom sued Google for copyright infringement, claiming that YouTube had made available nearly 160,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom's entertainment programming. This month the court ordered Google to hand over logs of every use of YouTube clips since Google bought YouTube in October 2006. According to the Observer's John Naughton, this means that "if you have watched a YouTube clip at any time since November 2006, a record of that will be passed to Viacom's lawyers." The implication, "is that all that information can, at the stroke of a judicial pen, be handed over to third parties."
If you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear, we're told. Martyn Thomas's demolition of this mindless mantra at a recent IET debate at Surrey University was total and deeply felt: "There are good reasons why ordinary completely upright people have things to hide. They may be escaping an abusive relationship. They may be celebrity getting away from stalkers. They may be children in care needing to be in safe houses, or people who have suffered bouts of mental illness – 20 per cent of the population – and want to conceal that."
Rape victims, he said, want to conceal their identities: "There are people working in abortion clinics, in Huntingdon Life Sciences, and they have to deal with people who are threatening to blow up their family. Prison officers want to conceal their identities. There are hundreds and hundreds of issues like these. Just because privacy doesn't matter to you, it's perilous to assume it doesn't matter to other people."
David Birch is a privacy sceptic. The founder of Consult Hyperion and the author of a book on digital identity management, Birch lectures on the impact of new information and communications technologies. In his view, the people, not the technology, are at fault.
For him the concern about the masses of information now accumulating in huge, expensive government and private databases is not that hackers can get access to it. Animal rights terrorists were able to locate and fire-bomb the homes of scientists at Huntingdon Life Sciences simply because they had a confederate inside the DVLA. Says assistant information commissioner Jonothan Bamford: "It's the inside job that causes the greatest risk, not someone hacking in."
Local authority databases, for example, are available alike to medical practitioners and the staff of leisure centres. That's why Bamford and others are particularly worried about the scope for misuse posed by ContactPoint, a database set up under the 2004 Children Act in the wake of the Victoria Climbié case. ContactPoint allows health, social service and other practitioners coordinate support for particular children. ContactPoint now identifies every child in England up to the age of 18 by name, address, gender, date of birth and a unique identifying number, with the names and contact details of each child's parent or carer.
The argument for ContactPoint, says Bamford, is to share information about vulnerable children. "But ContactPoint isn't just vulnerable children, it's all children. If people want to find a needle in a haystack, why do they insist on building bigger haystacks? We don't need to have information on every child in the UK."
It's the widespread access to ContactPoint that has Martyn Thomas alarmed. Victoria Climbié, "would not have been on that database. You don't help the nation's children by building such systems and making the information available to several million people. Some will be child abusers, and you will cause more to be damaged than you protect."
But just because they're logging our phone calls doesn't mean they're listening.
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