Privacy and stating the obvious again about UK ID cards (because we need to)
Clearly the UK government hasn't quite understood the bleedin' obvious about the ID card scheme. Namely that, with relatively little effort, they could find out everything they needed to know about us far more easily than that.
Over at Virtual Economics, Seamus McCauley has made a point that cannot be made enough, clear as it is to anyone who spends any time in the vicinity of a computer:
The government's apparent hope that by assembling a national database it will hold a lot of information about me is already being rendered irrelevant by my voluntary publication of everything about me in a various fora. In the age of social media, privacy is bunk.
I Googled my name the other day, and it spewed back things I didn't remember writing. Yet I did - there was my name at the bottom. All the government need do is use the powers they already have and a file the length of my arm can be created on me, though God knows there won't be anything interesting in it.
Perhaps we should suggest that the ID card scheme should only be put into practice for Luddites, the Amish, those who cannot use computers for any reason and those who refuse to. Everyone else will have left a beautiful trail of Internet crumbs that can be neatly swept up by the government with less expense, trouble and controversy than the current proposed method. The initial plan is to allow students to voluntarily register themselves - after all, it makes perfect sense to go for the demographic who also voluntarily deliver the most detailed map of information, interests and behaviour all over the world wide web.
But what about those who don't autonomously spill the beans? It turns out the answer is still on the Internet.
The fact that those working against terrorism are turning to virtual worlds to carry out their investigations makes it even more obvious that the information that can be gleaned on people using those methods is far more valuable than the demographics they officially fit into. The ID scheme, we're told, is going to make us safer, but in an age where the September 11th hijackers were completely legitimately processed and trained in the country they attacked - the government knew where and who they were and, on the surface, what they were doing. The victims were no safer for that knowledge. With the Internet becoming an invaluable tool and place to hide, however, the Powers That Be are far better off trawling it for more than photos of drunk teenagers on Facebook, even if that does, of course, signal the demise of English society.
Alexandra Roumbas is Deputy Editor of Shiny Shiny. She's not trying to be facetious but it comes naturally.
