Digital Britain

The UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport (I still think this is a crazy mixture, but…)  published its final report on Digital Britain on 16th June 2009.  It claims that “The Digital Britain Report is the Government’s strategic vision for ensuring that the UK is at the leading edge of the global digital economy. [...]

UK Government announces that it has no plans to create a central database for storing communications data

The UK’s Home Office has recently announced that it no longer has any plans to create a centralised database to store all communciations data.  In its consultation paper presented to Parliament in April 2009, and entitled “Protecting the Public in a Changing Communications Environment“, the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith commented that “this consultation explicitly rules [...]

ContactPoint – the UK State is creating a database of all children

Along with many other parents across the UK, I have recently received a letter from one of my children’s schools informing me that legislation has just been passed “requiring Local Authorities to set up and run a nationwide database, known as ContactPoint, which will contain basic details about every child and young person under the [...]

Is the UK becoming a police state?

The Sunday Times published a front page report today noting that: ‘THE government is building a secret database to track and hold the international travel records of all 60m Britons. The intelligence centre will store names, addresses, telephone numbers, seat reservations, travel itineraries and credit card details for all 250m passenger movements [...]

Google and privacy

A BBC report raises concerns about privacy issues associated with Google’s new tracking service, Latitude.  This uses data from mobile phone masts, GPS, or wi-fi hardware to update a user’s location automatically.  Although it is an opt-in service, there are fears that not everyone may know that their phone is broadcasting their location.
There is, though, [...]