ICO to investigate surveillance for Parliamentary report
According to The Register:
Privacy watchdog the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) will report to Parliament later this year on the degree to which UK citizens are put under surveillance.
The study will be a follow up to a previous ICO report which said that citizens were at risk from growing pressure in Government to share information between departments and even with the private sector, and that companies’ data gathering threatened to create a two-tier consumer society.
“Two years ago I warned that we were in danger of sleepwalking into a surveillance society,” said then-Commissioner Richard Thomas on the launch of that report. “Today I fear that we are in fact waking up to a surveillance society that is already all around us.”
The ICO has commissioned a new study into surveillance in the UK which will be the basis of its report to Parliament later this year. Parliament’s Home Affairs Select Committee has asked the ICO to make the surveillance report.
The Surveillance Studies Network (SSN) will produce the study on which the ICO will base its findings. SSN, which is a charitable company, will produce the factual analysis on the ways and the degree to which ordinary UK citizens are put under surveillance.
The new report will be the follow up to a 2006 ICO report ‘A Surveillance Society’, also produced by SSN.
