Mary Fisher wrote:
[i]
................ want to see *each* such connection evaluated
on its *merits*, balancing gains in administrative convenience against
risks to privacy.

And you really believe that will happen?

Well, good software system design practice requires it; and as far as
handling personal data's concerned, the law of the land - the Data
Protection Act - requires it too.

shamefully, two such bent public servant got a small fine and a suspended
sentence. That wasn't exactly a message about strong enforcement.

One swallow ...

positively indicates that claims of a swallow-free land are false. One
swallow sighting per person allows a guesstimate of the swallow
population, allowing for whether they fly about a lot or generally hide.
In the case of people who are bent, or are simply helpful on the phone
(look up 'social engineering' if you're not sure what I'm on about),
there's a lot more than just one or two working away.

As pointed out above, it's not that there will be more errors necessarily,
but that the consequences of errors will be greater.

To have consequences you have to have the errors.

You're serious that your initial intuition is that the National Identity
Register's data would be error-free? Would it shake that intuition to
hear that the error rate on the Driver Vehicle Licensing database is 30%
- i.e. that a little under one in three entries have an inaccuracy?
(Would you believe me anyway?)

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.

Will they? You know that? How?

25 years' experience in the IT industry, reasonably careful attention to
the trade press, and the odd personal experience as a consumer. One
well-known favourite-of-the-middle-clarsses department store has hade my
name utterly mangled on its storecard for over 10 years, and hasn't
fixed it after multiple letters and calls. It really doesn't matter
enough to either of us: I get to spend there using my account card, they
get it paid off.

Do, please, take a look at www.zaba.com,

I did look, you might think it's relevant, I think it's subjective, it's
neither short nor, sorry to say this, readable.

I can't see any problem in submitting the information which is suggested as
a problem. I'll tell you all my relevant information now if you like. And
much good may it do you.

You may be happy to have your information widely available; I accept
that a chunk of mine is, too. However, I've had a *stack* of anguished
emails from police and similar people, who really want themselves OFF
the zabasearch.com database. (For those who haven't been over to
zaba.com, zabasearch.com is NOTHING TO DO WITH ME: it's a free
people-search engine operating in the US concerned with US residents. It
aggregates info from public sources - not just phone books, but lots of
local government records, particularly property-purchase stuff, and
whatever private-sector sources it can lay its hands on).

In the US you see, there's no general data protection regime: data is
considered owned by the company you give it to for one purpose, and
they're free to sell it on to anyone else. In the US, police officers
and similar typically wear name badges on their uniforms (rather than
the traceable pseudonym approach we have in the UK, with a constable's
shoulder number). So they get kinda twitchy when a new service makes
available - for free and at a coupla clicks of the mouse - information
avout their home addresses, which previously took, for example, a manual
search down at the county records office through ledgers indexed not by
name but by address...

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

Oh. In that case I've misunderstood.

Er - are you sure,100% certain, that NOTHING has been said about it?

Yes. I follow this stuff reasonably closely (does it show? ;-). The Home
Office's first consultation was in 2002-3. The DTI Foresight programme
on Cybertrust and Cybercrime, which touched on this stuff (too lightly,
as I now think) and which I had a non-trivial role in, was in 2003-4.
The draft Bill was lost at the end of the last parliamentary session,
but is to be reintroduced very early in the next one. I've skimmed the
text of the Bill itself, and read the commentaries. Nowhere in there, or
in Home Office statements, have I seen any mention of a referendum. We
tend to reach for those only for things which are of massive
constitutional importance, and (cynically) upon which the government of
the day is itself internally divided. So, we had one on entering the
European Common Market, as I believe it was called back in the days of
Heath, Wilson, and Callaghan. We're promised one on adopting the Euro,
and on the next European Constitution (unless the French and/or Dutch
avoid Tony having to put it to us at all, by voting No ahead of ours).

Stefek