Appendix A
As the government moves steadily towards introducing
data-matching—the exchange of our personal information between
public bodies without our consent—it is worth considering
the words of Sir Nicholas Browne-Wilkinson. As long ago as 1990,
Sir Nicholas, then a senior high court judge, now a law lord,
warned: "If the information obtained by the police, the Inland
Revenue, the social security services, the health service and
other agencies were to be gathered together in one file, the freedom
of the individual would be gravely at risk. The dossier of private
information is the badge of the totalitarian state."
Eight years later, Elizabeth France, then data
protection registrar now the information commissioner, echoed
these fears: "Wholesale data-matching exercises are a major
invasion of the private lives of people to whom no suspicion of
any wrongdoing attaches."
But as the report from the performance and innovation
unit—one of Whitehall's most influential bodies—data-matching
is very much back on the government agenda. The unit's lengthy
report dwells on the potential advantages of easier, quicker,
cheaper, more convenient, delivery of services ranging from benefits
and tax returns to driving licences, and in tackling crime and
fraud. It estimates that the cost of identity fraud to the economy
amounts to £1.2 billion a year.
The report also emphasises the need to protect
privacy. But it also admits there has to be a "trade-off
between individual privacy and the public good". It adds
that "where data are used or shared without the consent of
the individual" a balance must be struck between individual
rights and the "wider public interest".
The definition of the public interest is extremely
broad. It includes national security—a term described in
Whitehall as an "ambulatory concept"—public safety,
statistical analysis, the protection of the economy, health, morals,
and the "protection of the rights or freedoms of others".
Ministers cling to the old argument that the
innocent have nothing to fear. The information commissioner's
annual report this year revealed it had received almost 10,000
complaints about the handling of personal data. In one case, a
man received demands from the Child Support Agency about a child
who was not his. The department of work and pensions had allocated
his national insurance number to both him and the real father.
Similarly, an audit of the Police National Computer
found that 65% of its records contained errors. And in 1999, 214
cases involving abuse by staff of the benefits agency were investigated.
The passport agency and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency
(DVLA) want to combine their databases on the grounds that it
will make it easier to order a new driving licence or passport.
Yet the failings of computer databases in one of these agencies
led to more than 500,000 people waiting for passports in early
summer 1999, while the DVLA has admitted selling information about
vehicle licence owners to private companies.
As the civil rights group, Liberty, has pointed
out, the scope for all those abuses and errors being compounded
in a data-matching run are obvious.
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