The trouble with (government use of personal) data and why it keeps getting worse 21 Oct 2008
Posted by Peter Cruickshank in Privacy, UK, egovernment, information retrieval, politics.Tags: data protection, data sharing, Privacy, UK
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Ooops. Looks like I’ve been letting my link gathering get away with me. I’ve now tidied things up a bit by pulling out the government/policy level links into this item:
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Quoting an article in Government Computing in response to the earlier piece by Matthew Taylor about government use of data. Mathieson points to limitations and unexpected side-effects of government driven by data. He argues that it ignores the human costs in something like abolishing the common travel area with Ireland, or of endemic workplace surveillance, and adds the dangers of new forms of discrimination eg against those unable to provide biometrics, or whose data is inaccurate.
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The error rate in personal data is still around 30%+, decaying by 10% pa. The Directors Forum on Information Governance organised by EURIM on 24th November is seeking advance discussion papers that cover not just what needs to happen but how to bring about the changes of political and regulatory processs that are necessary to identify and encourage good practice, not just tick-box compliance.
For a bit of possibly happy news, here’s a (MySociety-related) project that tries to make government data useful to the rest of us (it’s been around for a while now, but no harm reminding you):
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Tell us what you’d build with public information and we could help fund your idea!
And finally, here’s a group that could possibly be helping the formal side of e-government get to grips with the issue:
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Connecting people to learn and share. A community platform supporting professional social networks across local government and the public sector. It provides a secure environment for knowledge development and sharing through online communities of practice. For people based in England & Wales and in Scotland. This service is provided by the Improvement and Development Agency for local government and a partnership is in place with the Improvement Service for local government in Scotland.
All these links were found through or inspired by Philip Virgo’s excellent blog at ComputerWeekly ‘Where IT Meets politics’
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