The ongoing debate – or debacle – over identity cards is a good reflection of public attitude towards large-scale government IT projects.
The whole system relies on a certain level of trust between the government and its citizens, which appears to be lacking. While the government is asking for the rights to store a range of personal details on each card and on a central database, and to charge people for the privilege, the general public remains unconvinced about the abilities of its elected leaders to respect privacy and keep the costs to a minimum while doing so.
As MPs debate cost issues with the House of Lords, privacy groups are voicing concerns about giving the government control of all this sensitive data – and trusting it to use the information fairly.
However, the privacy argument seems to sideline a fairly important fact – that the government already has access to all this data, or the majority of it anyway, through bodies such as the Passport Agency and DVLA.
The difference is that with current systems, information is not housed in a central system.
So perhaps those in the privacy camp would do better to call for guarantees that any central identity database will be totally secure and subject to strict access controls, rather than sticking to the “Big Brother” issue of the government getting control of data to which it already has access.
Similarly, privacy is proving to be an obstacle to public acceptance of radio-frequency identity (RFID) wireless tags. Privacy groups have raised suspicions that the main focus of RFID investment is to spy on people. They have highlighted the potential for companies to use tagged items to track the movements of, say, warehouse staff or shoppers.
More recently, security experts have warned about the use of RFID. Hence an alert sent by a firm last week with an alarming headline about pets being infected with computer viruses. Though it may worry dogs and cats, the warning related to news that Dutch researchers have demonstrated that RFID tags – sometimes used in pet collars or implants for identification purposes – can be infected with malware.
The claims were quickly played down by some industry and security experts, who argued that the researchers had deliberately created a weak system that could be exploited by the virus they developed.
As with the ID card privacy debate, RFID opponents tend to take a narrow focus, claiming that it won’t be long until the “spy chips” are injected under our skin to monitor behaviour in the workplace and make sure our toilet visits aren’t too frequent.
In reality, the long-term uses could be much more beneficial to individuals – retailers could have your shopping bagged up and ready for collection before you’ve even set foot in store; or families could use tagged badges to keep track of one another’s movements around a theme park.
Most companies using RFID understand the requirements to let people know what data they’re collecting and what it will be used for.
Organisations must make sure they do this and keep the public informed, before the privacy debate overshadows the potential value of wireless tag technology.
