{"id":496,"date":"2006-10-24T09:05:53","date_gmt":"2006-10-24T09:05:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/?p=496"},"modified":"2006-10-24T09:05:53","modified_gmt":"2006-10-24T09:05:53","slug":"paternalism-and-privacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/?p=496","title":{"rendered":"Paternalism and privacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently had a questionnaire posted to me by the council. It was to guage my physical activity and full of the sort of personal questions the Census misses out (but I jump ahead of myself here). It is for a scheme branded ‘Smarten Up”<\/a>. I have a chance of winning a mountain bike if I hand over these details to quite whom I don’t know<\/em>.<\/p>\n

When I used to get this sort of marketing profile survey from private companies my second thought would invariably be what database this information would have been put on, and who the information would be shared with. So of course after temporarily rescuing it from the recycling pile I got to thinking how this information could be used for ‘my benefit’.
\nWe’ll skip past the fantasy thought the council might dig up the local drive-through burger shop and replace it with a local swimming pool and such like. The question of whether the government’s relaxation of inter-agency data sharing restrictions<\/a> is relevant at local government level is an issue but conceivably my GP could be notified of my wonderous athletic talents and send out a request for a check up at some appropriate moment, maybe a social worker could visit if my putative family doesn’t appear to be getting the exercise it so richly deserves.<\/p>\n

Now, as I mentioned, these questionnaires for various issues fill in the Census gaps about how people are going about their business, taken individually, anonymously and with limited scope they could possibly help the council direct tax funds to provide ‘better services’, however we are most definitely on the cusp of an age where these non-anonymous (remember the bicycle bribe?) surveys can be aggregated and linked with some identifier like, oh… let us say, your NIR number. Yes that’s a good one because then any state agency can quickly find out about your lifestyle, and it can be transferred to some central data store so it may ‘follow’ you when you move from one authority to another. Hooray!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently had a questionnaire posted to me by the council. It was to guage my physical activity and full of the sort of personal questions the Census misses out (but I jump ahead of myself here). It is for a scheme branded ‘Smarten Up”. I have a chance of winning a mountain bike if […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[35],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}