Tuesday, November 20, 2007

It's not just an ID card scheme you can't trust government with

Following the great child benefit debacle, Action on Rights for Children has issued a press release:
Last year Terri Dowty co-authored a report for the Information Commissioner which highlighted the risks to children’s safety of the government’s policy of creating large, centralised databases containing sensitive information about children. The government chose to dismiss the concerns of the reports authors.
See's ARCH's database masterclass for more on the subject.

1 comment:

dreamingspire said...

Last night (Tuesday) on Channel 4 News, Peter Sommer made a very telling point about the need for very senior management in govt depts to understand the effects of, and management of, very large systems at the heart of their organisations. Later on Newsnight Prof Ross Anderson made telling points about the number of warning reports that have been brushed aside by govt. Eventually he made a hit with the Minister over the huge risks of the large aggregations of data such as were copied onto those missing discs.
I have repeated personal experience of interfacing with teams in govt depts being run by people who have no idea what they are getting into, and who are not given any training or support on information security, data protection compliance, etc, etc. Put bluntly: they do not know what we are talking about. Their own policies are being ignored.