The sons no one forgets in the British Empire
One of the few saving graces in this era of decreasing American privacy is that it is worse in Britain. Privacy International's annual country privacy ranking has consistently ranked the UK as one of 3 or 4 worst in the world for privacy. America is typically in the tier slightly above; still bad, but at least not the worst.
A new plan to track youngsters' educational achievements beyond school has drawn fire from privacy critics. Every 14 year-old in the country will be given a lifelong "learner number" which will follow them and be updated throughout their life, until they retire. The database will record all of their education throughout their career as well as any disciplinary actions in school such as expulsions. The educational piece of these records only (supposedly) would be made available to future employers who wanted to check up on an employee's academic bona fides.
The problems with this plan are pretty obvious, I would think. Like every other scheme, it optimistically assumes the best possible scenario, ie, that the UK government would carefully protect this information for decades without an incident, let alone abuse the information itself.
This is one of the battles being fought around the world for a universal ID card. The announcement yesterday that Europe may start fingerprinting visitors, the fact that the US already does, the slow chipping away (no pun intended) at the resistance to the US "Real ID" and parallel efforts underway throughout the Western world are all leading to cradle-to-grave databasing of us all. It's sad that the formerly globe spanning powerhouse must be the country to lead the rest of the world into the unknown one more time.
Posted on February 13, 2008
