Anger over minister’s bid to put medical records on ID cards
James Slack writes in the Daily Mail about possible function creep in ID card proposals:
A Big Brother row erupted last night after the minister in charge of ID cards expressed a desire to load them with sensitive personal information such as medical records.
The Home Office insists the microchip contained on the controversial cards will store only basic details such as name, date of birth, a facial scan and fingerprints.
But Home Office Minister Alan Campbell has told MPs that a ‘future Government’ may want ‘to bring forward proposals to add to the amount of data held on a card’.
In a late-night Commons debate on Monday night he added: ‘Some people, including me, would quite like additional data on an identity card.
July 10th, 2009 at 09:59
The amount of data held on the card itself is, of course, a red herring. The important issue is how much data is held on the database, and the Identity Cards Act 2006 allows for that to be easily extended by the Home Secretary.
If the ID card scheme is deployed, function creep is absolutely inevitable. In 2004 the Assistant Information Commissioner, Jonathan Bamford, reminded us that from the time the last UK ID card was issued during World War II to the time of its abolition in 1952, the functions of the card went up from three to 39.
See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3731465.stm