Businesses could face greater scrutiny over the way they
use the personal data of credit card and loyalty card customers,
the Home Secretary, David Blunkett said yesterday (17
November).
Speaking after delivering a rallying speech in support of the
government's biometric ID card programme, Blunkett suggested that
the government could appoint a surveillance commissioner with
powers to regulate commercial as well as government data.
"People are always arguing that because it is the government
collecting data they ought to be suspicious. But the private sector
is almost above suspicion. I am a raising the issue that what is
good for the goose is good for the gander," he said.
The Home Secretary said that the public needed to wake up to the
fact that personal information they supply to retailers and banks
is far more detailed that the personal information that will be
collected on the ID card database.
"It is time people got real about what is happening to them," he
said. "A lot of information about where people shop and who they
bank with is valuable business information and is sold on to other
companies."
Launching a broadside against concerns over the privacy of
personal ID data, Blunkett argued that if the public was happy to
disclose a wide range of sensitive data to private companies, it
should not be concerned about disclosing data to the government,
which is more tightly regulated.
The central register proposed in the ID card scheme will contain
details of people's current and former addresses, their
fingerprints, facial characteristics, iris scans. The data base
will also keep a record of checks against the ID card, providing an
audit trail of services people have accessed.
But the data access to the data will be more carefully
controlled than more wide ranging data collected by the private
sector, Blunkett claimed.
"Store loyalty cards keep continuously updated details such as
the size of a persons household, whether they are employed or not
and the ages of their children, besides what they like to eat,
where and how often they shop and what brand of toothpaste they
use," he said.
"If you do hold a loyalty card - and the odds are that you do -
you have already consented to all this information being repeatedly
shared with other companies without any requirement to ask again
for your approval."
But the Home Secretary's suggestions that the private sector
should be more heavily regulated were greeted with scepticism by
the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas.
The private sector already under legal and commercial pressure
to handle personal data sensitively, he said.
"If they don't do with their data what they say, they will be in
trouble with my office and the market in general," he said