Unwarranted Snooping
A little while ago, I expressed concern about government not only disseminating, but collecting more information about the populace than they not only needed, but deserved to collect.
Here’s the latest outrage from Britain:
Government inspectors are to pry into the intimate details of more than 500,000 people a year, asking a series of probing questions about their sex lives and earnings.
Snooping officials will want to know about previous sexual partners, contraception, and how long couples lived together before marriage.
The 2,000-question survey from the Office for National Statistics will raise major concerns about privacy – especially as the data will be logged with the respondents’ names and addresses.
...
Civil servants claim the sensitive personal information will be made anonymous once it is processed at the department’s headquarters in Newport, South Wales – but that is not enough to satisfy privacy campaigners.
Doubts have also been raised about how useful the information will be, as people have a proven tendency to lie when quizzed about their sex lives.
Investigators conducting the new Integrated Household Survey – at a cost of more than £3.5million a year – will visit 200,000 homes at random each year and question each occupant – about 500,000 individuals altogether.
I know how I would respond to this outrage, but there’s no need to provide details about the invective I’d shower on the interviewer.
The most interesting line from the article, however, is this one:
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) claims it needs the comprehensive annual poll to keep up with social trends that will help Whitehall mandarins formulate policy.
...which leads me to the most obvious question, which is:
how exactly is this kind of information any business of government, and what gives them the right to formulate public policy based on it?
As far as I’m concerned, this questionnaire simply shows the British government’s most profound contempt for its citizens, but that’s nothing new.
I am reminded, as always, by my thoughts when I first looked at this issue: ”...the more data you give the government, the greater the likelihood that the data will, at some point, be used by the government, and not necessarily to your advantage.”
I don’t think that the U.S. government has the gall to try asking similar egregious questions in the future, but let’s bear this in mind in 2010, when the U.S. census takes place, and all sorts of areas will be probed in the “extended” questionnaire.
Name, address, number of people in the house: an enumeration required by the Constitution. That’s all the census demands, and that’s all they’re going to get from me in 2010.
