Data on 25 million UKs Missing!

2 special computer disks with the personal data and information on 25 million Britons his gone missing.

It is easy to develop a sense of creeping paranoia when you begin to contemplate just how many companies, government departments and other organizations know your personal data.

Hi-tech firm Garlik, which helps people gain some control over the use of personal data, estimates that personal details about average Briton can be found in more than 1,000 places on the web. What few people realize, said Ms Gallagher, was that handing over data to one organization can mean that it reaches many others and becomes an entry on the database they maintain.

"There is no awareness of what happens to that data when you give it away," said Ms Gallagher.

"It is not so much the organizations with which you willingly share data," she said, "it is where it goes after that."

Many organisations that collect data, such as credit checking agencies, were under commercial pressure to widen the scope of what they collect, said Ms Gallagher.

No longer are firms just interested in the basic facts about you - now what matters as much as what type of credit card you own is when you go shopping, which stores you visit and what you buy.

That pattern holds as much information as the raw facts about you - it helps companies decide which socio-economic bracket to put you and how to go about tailoring marketing to fit you and your lifestyle.

Watching them

Surveillance and the collection of data about people has become so pervasive that it has spawned a dedicated research organization - the Surveillance Studies Network.

Dr Kirstie Ball, a senior lecturer at the Open University, said that although many social scientists been studied the subject for years the pervasiveness of that scrutiny was prompting an upsurge of interest.

"That personal data held by every organization you interact with runs the parameters of your existence, your consumption, your entitlements," she said.

"We're all interested in the collection and application of personal data and its consequences for individual rights and social science concepts such as trust and discrimination," said Dr Ball.

"It merits study and understanding because its consequences can be tangible," she said.

For instance, she said, an employee ticking the wrong box when they enter your data into a database could mean a person ends up labelled as a former criminal or credit liability.

It is possible to ask to see the data that companies and organisations hold about you, but a very small number of people take up this opportunity to vet what is known about them. Making sure all of it is accurate would be a mammoth task.

For Ms Gallagher at Demos beefing up the power of the Information Commissioner to enforce the Data Protection Act would help redress some of the imbalance between the data companies hold about us.

"Organisations and companies should be responding to the way we live," she said.

Only by using those powers will the creeping spread of that data be held stemmed.

"You are not going to get people complying with data protection on the basis of good will," she said. "Data is just too valuable."

.whos watching you today??

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