Gordon Brown admits government cannot be trusted with our data

Gordon, we know!

Mr Brown appeared to accept data loss in future was inevitable.

“It is important to recognise we cannot promise that every single item of information will always be safe because mistakes are made by human beings. Mistakes are made in the transportation, if you like in the communication, of information.”

Also in the input of it, the storage of it, the communication of it, and errors in the systems that process and store it, etc.

So storing as little data as possible would be best, wouldn’t you say?

So why does your government insist on storing ever more data?

Magic

David Davis in the Guardian:

Faced with intractable problems with political pressure for a solution, the government reaches for a headline grabbing high-tech “solution”. Rather than spend the resources, time and thought necessary to get a real answer, they naively grasp solutions that to the technologically illiterate ministers look like magic. And most ministers are very illiterate about any serious technology.

So what we get is a form of magic, but one that is of most use to the dark side of our society. Many of us have worried about the state deliberately misusing the vast quantities of data that they hold on us. That problem is still there. But perhaps it will turn out that the biggest threat to our society in these enormous databases is that the government will be the unwitting, indeed witless, accomplice, to every hacker, fraudster, sexual predator, criminal or terrorist that would like easy access to all our details. That, far from protecting us all against identity theft, the state, with its grandiose projects, will be its biggest facilitator.