Sharing government databases helps nosey bastards ‘social policy making’.

Well, that’s more than enough reason to do it then, ain’t it?

Sharing government-held personal information could bring huge medical and social benefits, a government group has said.

The new Council for Science and Technology has recommended pooling data to deliver better targeted public services and improve policymaking.

A few simple words should be brought to the Council’s attention: ‘Data’. ‘Protection’. And ‘Act’. Specificially the bit about data being kept and used only for the specific puropse for which it was collected. Not for social policy making. That’s what the census is for.

However, the owner of the biggest collection of datasets in the country – the UK government – uses the information at its disposal at a fraction of its potential, according to Dr Walport.

We know that the government is the biggest holder of data in the UK:”although I think that the Tesco clubcard database is catching them up”:http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4247169 . Which is why, in this instance, government ineptitude is a good thing. If the government tied all it’s databases together (ID Database, anyone?) then they’d know pretty much everything about everyone. Or they’d say that they knew everything about everyone. Looking at the quality of their data, they’d be able to comprehensively prove that I was in fact a black lesbian immigrant from Namibia.

Not that I’d mind being a black lesbian immigrant from Namibia. It’d just come as a bit of a shock to the system.