Yesterday’s report, that the EU was demanding “clear consent” from internet users before their private data could be used to gather commercial information about their shopping habits, confirms yet again – almost every week – that secret surveillance has got completely out of hand in Britain. It appears that the UK-listed company Phorm has developed technology that allows internet service providers to track what their users are doing online – information that can then be sold to media companies and advertisers who can thus put more relevant advertisements on websites the users visit. This technology was recently tested on BT’s internet customers without their consent, which then provoked complaints from users and MEPs and, in the absence of any clampdown by the UK Government, triggered the EU intervention. Nor is this the first time that invasions of privacy have sparked resistance, which may finally generate the systematic law on privacy that is now so urgently needed.

Earlier this month sweeping new powers came into operation under which the mobile calls, emails and website visits of every person in Britain will be stored. There are already strong objections, which can be expected to grow, that this allows Government to create a giant Big Brother super-database, containing a trillion items of information per year, able to map everyone’s private life. Facebook set up Beacon, an advertising programme, designed to track the spending habits of its users’ visits to other websites, but then faced a privacy backlash when thousands of members signed a petition demanding its removal. Similarly, Google launched Street View, a 3D mapping feature, but also encountered resistance when people in one village prevented a Google vehicle from taking pictures of their street.
In another dimension of the same issue, widespread protests have been made against the police practice of holding the genetic details of hundreds of thousands of people even when they have been proved innocent. A recent European (ECHR) court ruling declared that this broke their right to privacy when the profiles of persons charged were held on the DNA database years after criminal proceedings against them had been dropped. Yet the British Government has planned to respond to this by removing from the database the profiles of those found innocent whilst at the same time retaining the original DNA samples! – such is the contempt in the Home Office and amongst Ministers for the whole principle of privacy.
How far will this riding roughshod over basic liberties go? Already the collection of personal information residing in databases including advanced passenger information, airline bookings, passport data, immigration, identity and border records, criminal records, financial documents, and telephone and other communication records can provide the authorities with a fairly comprehensive picture of every individual in Britain. And once an individual has been assigned a unique index number (whether a national insurance number or a unique genetic identifier), the linkage achievable across numerous databases maps the life of that person in a manner not authorised in any original valid consent for data collection.
What is desperately needed is a new and comprehensive privacy law (rather than the present amalgam of judicial decisions) to set down systematically the acceptable parameters within which the latest digitalised technologies are required to operate. With the present Government there is no prospect of that, but it should be mobilised into an election issue. Meanwhile there is also an urgent need for the establishment of a high-powered, well-resourced watchdog body, similar to the ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office) in respect of Freedom of Information, to enforce an ethical framework that genuinely balances the fundamental right to privacy against repeated intrusiveness by the State and by commerce.

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