ntouk.com - Jerry Fishenden's technology policy blog

It's almost as if the House of Commons Committee on Home Affairs had been reading Kim Cameron's "laws of identity". The very start of the summary from their 5th Report states:

"In the design of its policies and systems for collecting data, the Government should adopt a principle of data minimisation: it should collect only what is essential, to be stored only for as long as is necessary."

This reflects sentiments expressed at last week's "Who do they think we are?" event in London (and elsewhere many times over the last few years). It's also is in line with the suggestions we made in our original response to the Transformational Government consultation (which additionally warned about the risks of hanging all personal information off a single unique identifier).

The Report also "sets out a series of ground rules for Government and its agencies to build and preserve trust".

The summary doesn't explicitly echo what Sir James Crosby put in his recent report on identity assurance for the Prime Minister ("It's the citizen's data, nobody else's"), but it's a clear undercurrent. Re-establishing trust has to be a high priority, and re-thinking the way our personal information is handled (at the technical, people and process levels) is a good place to start.

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