The Privacy, Identity & Consent Blog

It's been the busiest of weeks for privacy, identity and consent:

• MPs' suffering data loss on the most spectacular scale (or at least that's their version of events);
• the Home Office choosing to completely disregard the European Court's ruling on retention of DNA data, and hang on to it anyway;
• the Home Office hiding its interception and modernisation plans by forcing the databases onto telecommunications companies (and hence on to their customers);
• the Home Office admitting that in fact the cost of ID Cards are significantly higher than those of simply modifying the existing passport system, despite years of asserting that wasn't the case;
• the Home Office formally announcing Manchester as a 'Beacon Area' for ID Cards in the face of increasing opposition from pilots' unions;
• and some good news in the form of the publication of Dave Birch's amazing 'Psychic ID' paper.

I'll be writing about all these next week, but this past week's been consumed by preparing for our Identity and Privacy conference. For those of you attending, I look forward to catching up with you there, for everyone else normal blogging service will be resumed shortly.