Steve Boggan writes in The Guardian: Earlier this year, Tony Blair announced plans to allow government departments to share more information about us, while rubbishing the suggestion that this would lead to the creation of a “Big Brother” super-database. At the moment, he said, over-zealous rules on data-sharing leave government departments hamstrung. Each one stores information on us, and much of it is out of date. Ministers even cited the disturbing case of one man who had had to contact 44 branches of government to sort out affairs when a family member died. How much simpler it would be, then, to have all our identity information in one place where it could be easily updated with one phone call or letter. To most people, unfamiliar with the myriad government proposals and strategy documents on “e-government” and data sharing, it might have sounded like a good idea – even “perfectly sensible”, […]