Support Digital Rights

[drplokta]

There's a new pledge on PledgeBank for people to sign up to pay £5 per month to set up a UK digital rights organisation. If they get 1,000 pledges, then it will happen. 31 so far, including me, but it was only created yesterday.

Go here if you want to sign up. And spread the word.

Comments

Addendum

[andrewducker]

I'd like to add that I'm not in any way convinced that it _will_ be well implemented. But I have nothing against the idea in theory.

Re: Addendum

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

There are several reasons to oppose the government's proposals. The 'in principle' side is only one of them. Even if I were not opposed to them in principle, I would probably oppose the proposed scheme as it is likely to be very expensive (given the hostory of government IT contracts), very poorly managed (ditto), and seems over-complex if not fundamentally flawed. An ID card purely for identification, with no huge database backbone, is one thing. The vast 'ministry of identification and peering over your shoulder' that is in fact being proposed, is another thing entirely.

After all, there was nothing wrong with the poll tax in principle it was the implementation that was the problem, and that people onto the streets.

Re: Addendum

[andrewducker]

Actually, I'm against the poll tax in principle. People should pay according to their ability to do so. Charging everyone the same amount meant that poor people were paying a much larger percentage of their income.

Re: Addendum

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

Actually the original scheme for the poll tax included provision for zero payments for those earning less than some value. The treasury scuppered this, and upped the costs for everyone else, leading to the problems we saw.

Re: Addendum

[andrewducker]

We already have large amounts of info kept on you, across multiple departments. And whenever you go to one you have to tell them the information you've already told the one across the hall, and then they have to go and make 15 information requests to fill in their own blanks, and sometimes it goes wrong because they've got you down with a slight mispelling in one case, and a a subtly different address in the other.

They _have_ all the information - they just keep multiplying their mistakes because it's not joined up. I want it all joined up and then I want access to see my own information so I can correct whatever egregious mistakes they've made in it.

Re: Addendum

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

Well you're not going to get that access - that's for sure!

And if its all joined up, each msitake is propagated everywhere. That doesn't sound better to me.

Re: Addendum

[andrewducker]

Joining it up would mean you had one address, rather than having a different one on each system. That means one place to fix it. I don't see how that propagates mistakes.

Re: Addendum

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

Because that mistake pollutes all connected information. If the NHS, say, has my wrong name, that's not going to affect my tax records. If its all joined up, it does.

Re: Addendum

[andrewducker]

It'll also be immediately obvious, because all of them will be trying to look in the wrong place.

At work we used to have 6 different address systems, built over a period of several years. We had endless problems with inaccuracies and mismatches before we pulled them all together. Now if there's a problem it turns up quickly and gets sorted in one place. It's saved vast amounts of time and the number of customer complaints has dropped significantly.

Re: Addendum

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

That's true of information such as addresses which are frequently used. Its less true of rarely used information which might still have serious consequencies. This is especially the case if you're not allowed to check all of your own information, which I think is likely the case with the ID card database.

Also, if you have several independent databases, its much easier to cross check if something is wrong. Its like a weak hulled boat with lots of watertight compartments compared to a strong hulled boat with no internal security. It might be more difficult to hole, but one that happens you lose the whole thing.