Jon Bright (London, OK): There are two ways of approaching the problem of gun control. One is to argue that responsible adults can be mature enough to look after a gun, know what its proper place is, and can understand just how dangerous and powerful a tool a gun is. The other is to argue that guns are simply too dangerous, that the public can never be trusted to responsible with them, and they will either cause harm accidentally, or will be wilfully misused for criminal purposes, and therefore people cannot be allowed to possess them. The first puts faith in the capacity of humans to regulate themselves and take responsibility for their actions. The second puts faith in the state to regulate our environment and look after our well being. I'm glad, on the issue of gun control at least, in the UK we have the latter, with all but a few small exceptions.
The issue of control over our personal data is an interesting sort of mirror image of this debate. Do we trust the government to be mature enough to look after our data, know what its proper place is, and understand just how dangerous and powerful a tool it can be? Or should we think that having centralised databases storing all our data is simply too dangerous, that the government can never be trusted to be responsible with such power, and will either cause harm accidentally or wilfully misuse it for criminal purposes, and therefore cannot be allowed to possess it? The first puts faith in the capacity of the state. The second keeps the power with the individual human.
A centralised database of personal information is an enormously powerful tool. It can be used to cause great harm accidentally - simply through misplacing copies of it. Or, as it emerged today, a poorly thought through mail merge of sensitive data. In an incident that would be funny if it wasn't so tragic (and is actually, I must admit, still rather funny) HMRC have sent out 7.25 million letters (by second class post) apologising to the families whose data it misplaced - only problem being that the letters themselves contained the name, address, NI numbers and Child Benefit numbers of those involved. Anyone want to take bets on how many of these letters don't reach their destination?
The government has displayed, in extremely plain terms, that it simply does not understand what personal data is about, or why it was dangerous. I agree we can't be trusted with guns. But I don't think they can be trusted with data.
