UK minister: ‘There must be a limit to what the gov knows about its people’
Anna Leach writes in The Register:
Any new British privacy law will have to protect citizens’ privacy from the government as much as from the media.
That’s according to UK Justice Minister Tom McNally, who was speaking on Data Protection Day at an event organised by the Information Commissioner’s Office. McNally discussed the new defamation and privacy legislation that the ministry is mulling over in light of the Leveson Inquiry into the ethics and practices of the British press.
New technology has raised the stakes, McNally said:
“[I]n a free society there should be a limit to what the government knows about its people. And now, the capacity of the state to do that is almost limitless.”
