The Price of Privacy

The government's proposals to allow cross departmental dissemination of personal private data is a breach of our right to privacy.

Time and time again we are told that it is for our good, but the reality is that soon we will have no privacy left as every civil servant will be able to peruse details that will be unrelated to their professional needs, simply because access will be there.

Potentially they may want to monitor the individual for reasons other than serving their needs and whilst some think this unlikely, such open access would allow this. This is so as the IT approach to collecting this data will be riddled with error, open to abuse and will fail me and every other citizen who will pay billions in tax for the disservice.

What a price to pay for so little in terms of value for the citizen

I remember David Blunkett as Home Secretary proposing that emails should be accessed by, amongst others, the local fire authority. This was a disgrace then, but here we are again with a sledgehammer to crack a nut approach.

I recall back then asking a colleague who could not see the wrong in this, because she had “nothing to hide”, if she would object to a lowly clerk at the fire authority reading an email she had sent concerning a visit to her GP dealing with her medical treatment. She replied she would object and I pointed out that as she had nothing to hide, and by her own 'logic', she could not protest. She quickly changed her mind.

Essentially there is no difference in what I discussed back then, and what we face today. One of the other objections I have is that the public are not being told what these measures will mean to them, just as my colleague back then did not appreciate the impact of Blunkett's proposals because he did not publish them fully.

We as citizens endure scrutiny on a scale unimagined less than a generation ago. It permeates every interface with government. It involves a trade-off of the right to privacy, with the demand for access to your privacy, in order that you can access services.

An example of this is that if you want to renew your passport, you are obliged to allow your personal data to be disseminated to both public and private sector organisations in the UK. The only way you can control this, is to not renew. That is a direct assault on your rights that you are unable to resist, if you simply wish to exercise your right to travel. This is wrong.

I do not think that I can put it any better than Shami Chakrabarti who recently said “...when absolute rules like the prohibition on torture are compromised by our political rulers, how much harder to defend more subtle and qualified rights like the presumption of privacy from the chilling slogan politics of "nothing to hide, nothing to fear".”

There is a terrible wrong being done here and the foundation for that wrong was set by this government's willingness to ignore the rights of people for short-term political gain. We should all resist the rush toward a “Big Brother” society, if indeed we are not there already.