Losing our information

Personal details of every child in UK lost by Revenue & Customs:

The personal details of virtually every child in the UK has been lost by HM Revenue and Customs, the chancellor, Alistair Darling, admitted today.

The missing information includes the names, addresses and dates-of-birth of the children and the national insurance numbers, and in some cases the bank details, of parents claiming child benefits.

This, quite simply, is one of the big practical reasons why the government shouldn't be relentlessly collecting information about us. If the government, or a company for that matter, creates databases with huge amounts of private and personally-identifiable information, then at some point that information will escape. Someone will lose a laptop, or backup tapes, or fail to erase a discarded hard disk properly, and voila! -- the bad guys have got it. Not to mention that hackers get into every system eventually, given sufficient motivation. When the politician says "but this system will be totally secure" he's either lying, or else foolishly believed the vendor who lied to him.

I refuse to give out personal information whenever possible; whether to the government or companies. The only way I can ever be sure that the British government won't leak my DNA profile to profiteers and villains, is to never give them a sample. So that's what I'll do. Can you imagine the implications of future identity theft, involving your DNA signature? When someone cloned my bank card, I got a new card. If someone steals your DNA, it's stolen for life.

I repeat, don't trust governments and companies with sensitive information. I bet the parents of "virtually every child in the UK" will come to wish they hadn't.

Which brings me to all the information, besides DNA samples, that the British government collects on us without our consent. They're keeping information about our movements, the physical location of our mobile phones, and all our phone calls, among other things. That information will leak too (though we may never know it leaked). It's only a matter of time.