Mary Fisher wrote:

Wouldn't it be more convenient in some cases to have that information?

Yes, it would. However, I (and other idiots like the Information
Commissioner, acting according to the law of the land on data protection
;-) want to see *each* such connection evaluated on its *merits*,
balancing gains in administrative convenience against risks to privacy.
It's your choice to rate your privacy at '0' in that balance; it's not
your right (or Charles Clarke's) to impose that choice on everyone else.

You're assuming that there WILL be bent insiders. Worse, I suspect, that
there will be no check on such bent insiders.

No, I'm not just *assuming* this. I'm basing my figure of 50-100 quid on
credible, established reports of what it costs private investigators to
ferret out said information: including a recent court case where,
shamefully, two such bent public servant got a small fine and a
suspended sentence. That wasn't exactly a message about strong enforcement.

I believe that there still would be ways of amending information on the
proposed ID system. Don't ask me how I know, I don't know,I said I believe.

Of course there will; necessarily, the checks will be more stringent
precisely because changes will matter more. Hence my claim, which you
'rail against', that 'it can be harder to get the bureaucracy to
fix them'.

You see, Stefek, that's the kind of assumption I rail against. How do you
KNOW that it can be harder to get bureaucracy to fix things? Or that errors
will be more widespread than they are on other databases anyway? I believe
that there will be checks.

As pointed out above, it's not that there will be more errors
necessarily, but that the consequences of errors will be greater. And
the entries will be run not only by public-spirited people, but by
contractors on minimum wage - maybe some offshour outsourced workers too
- whose immediate goals are about meeting their supervisor-set targets
on 'number of cases dealt with per hour', because that's easy to
measure; while 'accuracy', 'quality', 'right first time' are harder to
measure - so aren't in most data-entry shops.

Somewhere we have to have trust.

Yes; and I want to hold those mechanisms up to careful examiniation.

So it will be easier and cheaper to do something they can do now. Not, in my
opinion, a greater 'threat' than is already there.

Do, please, take a look at www.zaba.com, for a clear case in point of
how making things 'easy' to look up changes society's behaviour. I
assure you it's relevant, short, and pretty readable!

it seems to me that (a) you

Me personally??

No: 'one', more specifically 'the engaged citizen'

should establish a strong genuinely-informed consensus that 'most of us'
really do want to live that way;

Perhaps those who don't want it need to do the same - without the hyperbole
which has been exhibited in this thread..

I believe that a referendum has been talked about, which still means that
(probably) a majority of people won't be happy :-)

Nuttin's been said about a referendum on ID cards!

Cheers, Stefek