UK Home Affairs Committee Urges Minimization of Government Data Collection
The UK Home Affairs Committee has released its fifth report (pdf) on whether the country has become a surveillance society and urges the government to minimize the amount of data on citizens that is collected and retained. The Committee said it “rejects a characterisation of Britain as a ‘surveillance society’ but warns against the expansion of surveillance techniques and the dangers of ‘function creep’, where information is used for purposes beyond those originally intended.” The Committee cautioned against underestimating the “risks associated with the collection and use of personal information in databases in particular and the monitoring of individuals’ behaviour in general,” emphasizing, “Mistakes or misuse of data can result in serious practical harm to individuals.”
In the report, the Committee urged the government against undermining the public trust through increased surveillance:
Privacy plays an important role in the social contract between citizen and state: to enjoy a private life is to act on the assumption that the state trusts the citizen to behave in a law-abiding and responsible way. Engaging in more surveillance undermines this assumption and erodes trust between citizen and state. In turn such an erosion of trust—with the citizen living under the assumption that he or she is not trusted by the state to behave within the law—may lead to a change in the reaction of the citizen and in his or her behaviour in interactions with other citizens and the Government.
The Committee also told the government that it “must ensure that any extension of the use of camera surveillance is justified by evidence of its effectiveness.” As I have written about before, no studies have shown that video surveillance significantly affects violent crime.
The Chairman of the Committee said, “[w]e are concerned with is the tendency to collect more and more data just because the technology allows it and for data to be used beyond the purposes it was initially collected for.” He said one example is the Committee “would completely object to any attempt to use data on children for the purposes of predictive criminal profiling rather than child protection and we want an assurance from Government that this kind of thing will not happen.” There has been increasing discussion of such predictive profiling of children in the UK.
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