Why are we giving the Government all our data if they can’t look after it properly?
IT is 75 years since George Orwell gave us Big Brother – the all-seeing, all-listening presence which would keep watch on us 24 hours a day in a future world.
The author of Nineteen Eighty-Four correctly foresaw that the state would be unable to resist the temptation to spy routinely on its citizens, and if anything underestimated the technology which would allow it to do so.
But what never occurred to him was that Big Brother would turn out to be such a bungling idiot when it came to handling our data.
It is hard to imagine a more damaging data breach than releasing the names, ranks and employment locations of serving officers in the Police Service of Northern Ireland — a data breach that was revealed on Tuesday.
Yes, these were the people who were targeted almost daily during the Troubles, with many shot on their own doorsteps.
Blatant disregard
Fortunately, Northern Ireland is a lot more peaceful now, and the home addresses of the officers were mercifully not included on the database that was accidentally disclosed by the PSNI.
Even so, officers investigating terrorism, fraud and other serious offences need to be able to do their work without their identities and the precise area of their work being made public.
There are implications for the rest of us, too.
Should we really be having to give our personal information to public bodies so freely when they cannot be trusted to keep it secret?
The PSNI error is far from the only mass data beach in recent times.
This week it was revealed that a cyber attack on the Electoral Commission’s computers had allowed the names and addresses of everyone on the electoral register between 2014 and 2022 to be made available online.
That is pretty well all of us, given that councils demand we enter ourselves on the register under the pain of a £1,000 fine.
True, any member of the public can apply to look through the register.
But to allow such information to leak online shows a blatant disregard for our data, allowing it to be used for purposes, such as mass marketing, which is supposed to be forbidden.
It wouldn’t be quite so worrying if the Government didn’t keep collecting ever more data on us and our lives.
Census forms now want to know our religion, sexuality, ethnicity, health and disabilities, whether we are transgender.
I am not saying that our government has sinister purposes for collecting all this information, but just imagine what the Third Reich could have done with all that data.
It is powerful material which, in the wrong hands, could turn out to very damaging.
Sadly, the state’s nosiness about us is not matched by its competence in keeping information out of the hands of criminals and other bad actors.
In just 15 months between January 2020 and March 2021 alone HMRC allowed 17 data breaches.
This is an organisation, needless to say, which comes down like a ton of bricks on members of the public who fail to disclose information about their finances.
But it can’t then be trusted to keep private that highly sensitive data.
There are huge penalties for private businesses that leak data.
Firms can be fined up to four per cent of their global turnover.
British Airways, for example, was fined £20million for allowing hackers to access personal data of 400,000 customers.
But how often do heads roll when it is a public sector agency that leaks our data?
We are being put increasingly at risk of data breaches by being forced to do more things online.
It used to be routine to apply for a passport, road tax disc and many other things at our local Post Office.
But now we are expected to apply for almost everything online.
The closure of bank branches has forced many people to switch to online banking against their will, putting them at risk of scammers out to steal their account details and passwords.
The Electoral Commission data breach is suspected by many in the security world to be the work of Russia.
But the Government has been extremely slow to appreciate the scale of threat posed by hostile and potentially hostile states.
Risk of fraud
It was only recently, for example, it occurred to the Government and local authorities that it is not a good idea to allow Chinese-made CCTV cameras to be incorporated into our CCTV network.
Modern, internet-connected cameras can easily be accessed remotely if their internal software allows.
Chinese-made equipment is now being removed from CCTV networks, but only slowly.
Technology is creating a frightening world in which, if there are flaws in the system, our personal information is only a few keystrokes away from being stolen by anyone, anywhere in the world.
We won’t know a thing and yet we may be put at risk of fraud and other criminal activity.
Before the Government tries to capture more data on us, it must make absolutely sure it can keep that information to itself.