Taking Liberties

Somebody's watching me - surveillance, privacy and identity

Your identity as it manifests itself in your collected data may not be your soul, but it does, in a very real way, represent your self. To surrender it willingly and comprehensively is to give up something you will never get back. New Labour themselves may not be cause for too much alarm to this end - their mania for data-gathering is at least based in some misguided urge to protect us - but there's no guarantee that future governments, inheriting such a toybox as the NIR [National Identity Register], won't use it to more malign and oppressive ends.

If you've done nothing wrong, why would you want to be treated as someone who has? Or as someone who might? A pre-crim, as it were. In some US states, women of reproductive age are now being asked to consider themselves 'pre-pregnant', and to quit smoking and take folic acid for the health of the zygote they may find themselves incubating at any time. Do we want to be considered pre-offensive by our government? Such a line of thinking leads to wholesale suspicion of more or less everyone, almost a reversal of 'innocent until proven guilty'.

The logic persists that if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to worry about. But what you've done so far in your life has been governed according to the laws as they are today. A future government may not share your views on right and wrong; and don't presume the next government, or the one after that, will hand you back your privacy and hold a mass bonfire of ID cards in Hyde Park, laying on fireworks and baked potatoes.

Richard Furlong, barrister

Does anyone have nothing they want to keep private? Is every law-abiding resident of Britain content to walk around in the figurative nude before the eyes of the state? Of course not, this is Britain. We all have things that we do not wish to become common knowledge. There are things we don't tell our closest friends, and could not imagine being tossed around between civil servants and from one agency to another. There are aspects of our data which are highly sensitive under any circumstances, and would cause horror if rudely released to strangers. Several politicians should know this from personal experience.

Personal data on its own, immutable as it seems, is as malleable as statistics - it can be manipulated to justify almost anything. With your data held on a database, you wouldn't know who was looking at it, what conclusions they were drawing, and how it was altering your life. What everyone has to fear, to start with, is false judgement.

Databases are already a fact of life. We're all on one or another, and sometimes it's to our advantage. But many people have already had uncomfortable experiences with the misuse of their information. Discovered they've been placed on a tenant blacklist after a disagreement with a landlord, found that they'd have to pay to see the full details, and that they'd remain on the list for two years. Found that the bank had somehow changed their name to that of a bordello madam in a cheesy Western, new credit cards and all. Been left waiting for child support payments or benefits or wages with no assurance of when they'd arrive, and no promise of compensation. The question should be: why would we want to submit ourselves to more of this, in glorious New Labour technicolour?

Read more about the book at the Taking Liberties website.