"Two years ago I warned that we were in danger of sleepwalking
into a surveillance society," said Commissioner Richard Thomas.
"Today I fear that we are in fact waking up to a surveillance
society that is already all around us."
Thomas commissioned a report which outlined the present and
immediate future of surveillance in the UK. It found that companies
already discriminate between customers according to social
profiling. With government keen to share data with the private
sector, that process is likely to accelerate, it found.
"It's a big business, the business of data aggregation in the
private sector, bringing together information on people's habits
and activities to sell commercially," Assistant Information
Commissioner Jonathan Bamford told OUT-LAW
Radio, the weekly technology law podcast.
"With the public sector we see an increase in pressure for
information sharing, the government has its transformational
government agenda, the idea that if only public authorities shared
more information, they'd do better things for the public. I think
we have to be clear on what the boundaries are in terms of data
protection rules and public acceptability."
The social profiling that is performed with the collected data
could have severely adverse affects on individuals, the report
warned. It described a near future where wealthy, educated people
would be mobile, would be fast tracked at airports and in
electronic sales processes. Those same methods would be used to
slow down the physical, social and economic movements of poorer
people, it said.
"If you are talking about building up profiles of people you are
going to find there's an element of social sorting going on," said
Bamford. "You actually see that some people become favoured and
others treated with suspicion."
"You could be the best behaved child in the class but if the
profile that's generated on you based on your relatives show you as
being a risk of being disruptive or being one of the 20% of people
who commit 80% of the crime in later life you're going to be
treated in a particular way whoever comes into contact with you,
however you are. There are worries there for the future for social
stigmatisation, social exclusion, a society of haves and have
nots," he said.
One fear expressed in the report is of 'mission creep', where
information projects created for specific reasons are expanded to
gather more and more data and share it more and more widely for
reasons other than those originally stated.
One of the scientists behind the UK's DNA database said that he
believed that that database had suffered 'mission creep' and has
become far too large. Designed to hold DNA data on convicted
criminals, it now holds information on many people who come into
contact with the police, whether guilty or innocent.
"Now hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent people are
populating that database," Professor Alec Jeffreys told the BBC
this week. Civil rights campaigners believe that a third of black
males in England and Wales are on the database. Jeffreys said that
the socio-economic and ethnic imbalance in the database is
"discriminatory".
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