“access to services and privileges not available to non-residents”. Preferential parking rates, you say?

This is the part that made me pause. It’s kinda important to know what the criteria are, or if it’s really as exclusive as this made it sound… would you just have to live there?

What this comes down to is that neither local councils nor, presumably, the commercial sector, supports the Data Protection Act. Given that younger people too on the whole have a relaxed attitude to privacy, at least as far as electronic media are concerned, it seems to me that the Act is a sick chicken…

Mike@2: can you tell us what specific breach of the DP Act you claim is happening? Certainly my listening to central govt people (most recently a Dept of Justice person) suggests that they think it OK to share all data about us across all of central govt – and, alongside that, they think we don’t object to that. Others hearing that then said that there are some serious studies under way to try to find out what we really think (and one contributor said prelim results of one study suggest we do care: we support the principle that data must only be used for the purpose for which it is collected).

I didn’t say that the Act was being breached necessarily – for the reason you give.

Rather, that it is seen, rightly or wrongly, as impeding effective government.

Mike@4: Impeding lazy government is I think a better way to describe it. The instance given by DoJ person was that of notifying a death, where their research says that as many as 44 govt bodies might need to know about the event, i.e. they want to save the next of kin / executors the labour of having to first discover what organisations need to know (or orgs the next of kin, etc, might want to advise if only the next of kin knew). I’m quite happy with that, but do need to know that that is all that the information will be used for. The ICO, BERR (now BIS) and others have recently run a project to look at privacy in this context, discussing user-controlled privacy in the sense of being able to control who gets the data and what they will use it for – not all participants agreed with the draft report, and Microsoft in particular declined to have their name on it. Techniques to assist with this are being developed, and it may be that they will be further developed in the context of universities plus their research partners being able to control project data while giving those who need it easy access.