The papers today all carry a story which first broke last month – the proposed use of credit rating agencies like Experian to catch people committing benefit fraud.

This is a very bad idea. Nobody approves of benefit cheats. But mining private data on a routine basis on the off-chance of catching people out is a disproportionate invasion of privacy. 

There's a presumption of innocence in this country, and trawling everyone's credit data and treating us all as suspects brings that into question. Furthermore, there is or should be a bright line between the state and the private sector. Taking powers of legal investigation and enforcement which ought to sit with the state, and granting them to private organisations, blurs that line. Worse still, if profit-making companies are rewarded by the number of people they catch they will have a perverse incentive to sling accusations in any even marginally plausible case – because they'll have nothing to lose and potentially something to gain in the smearing.

Ultimately, it's probably not in the interests of the companies either. People will be far less likely to comply with their requirements in the future if it's known that one risks such intrusion in doing so.

Credit agencies should think carefully about effectively becoming enforcers for the state, compromising private information they've accumulated about people.

By Alex
Deane

Update: I discussed this on Newsnight

I've written elsewhere about the Chief Surveillance Commissioner, who issued his Annual Report into surveillance in the United Kingdom this week. It shows that the level of covert surveillance in this country is shocking – these operations are now part of our nation's everyday life.

As readers of this site will know all too well, this surveillance isn’t just being run by MI5 or the police, and it’s not just mounted to detect serious crime or terrorism. Very real concerns about covert surveillance by local councils are dismissed by the Commissioner with two cursory paragraphs, with the suggestion that the problem lies with the way that the media reports such surveillance. This really is a grave abrogation of his responsibilities.

As our research showed, local councils approved and conducted over 8,500 separate covert surveillance operations in the last two years. Surveillance has been used for everything from allegations of benefit fraud and fly-tipping to dog fouling and allegations of lying about which school catchment area you live in. For this, councils up and down the country empower their employees to watch and record us for days or sometimes weeks. Take a look at the table in our research and you’ll probably see that your own council has done this. Not only has the media been reporting on a genuine concern, it is far more common and far more serious than the Commissioner can bring himself to admit. He should be a champion of accountability in surveillance, not an apologist for it. After all, this is the body we depend on to bring responsibility to this area – if he won’t take such abuses seriously, who will?

Worst of all, the Commissioner has revealed that after four years of his expensive endeavours the number of operations conducted in the past year that were unauthorised has gone up: there has been an increase in operations that broke the important and serious rules on covert surveillance and should never have happened. In last year’s report, he stated that he was happy that the appropriate disciplinary measures had been meted out in each such case. He gives no such assurance this year.

These unauthorised operations were not only intrusive, but also often extensive – the longest lasted for 24 days. That's over three weeks of illegal surveillance by the state, of people against whom nothing at all has been proven, and have not even been charged, without any apparent repercussions for those who did it. Because the Commissioner refuses to release any details of these unlawful operations, the victims of this outrageous intrusion will never know that they and their families were watched. In such circumstances it is not scaremongering but simply stating the obvious to say that it could have happened to you.

The newest disclosure is really the worst: a total of 661 errors, in which organisations obtained the wrong communications data, were reported to the ICC by public authorities in 2009. Again, instead of being critical of these abuses, the Commissioner is an apologist for those who committed them. Kennedy said that although the number seems large:

"it is very small when it is compared to the numbers of requests for data which are made nationally. I am not convinced that any useful purpose would be served by providing a more detailed report of these errors. I should add that neither I nor any of my inspectors have uncovered any wilful or reckless conduct which has been the cause of these errors," he said.

Kennedy disclosed that a "considerable proportion" of the errors were due to the incorrect transposition of telephone numbers. That is to say that people were snooped on for no good reason due to administrative incompetence by the snoopers, and they have no right to know that their conversations were listened to, or who did it, or for how long, or what they heard.

I discussed this matter on Radio 4’s World Tonight. I stressed the seriousness of the fact that the Commissioner had overseen an increase in unlawful surveillance. It would have been good to hear their view on this but in a moment of delicious but apparently unappreciated irony, the Office responsible for bringing accountability and transparency to this opaque and sometimes frightening field… refused to discuss the matter in public.

By Alex Deane

Do you use many mobile apps? If so, the odds are that the private information on your phone has been collected and sent somewhere without your knowledge.

So says the App Genome Project, a mammoth study of more than 300,000 apps.

The study found that apps are tapping into personal data and accessing other phone resources without telling users.Amongst the conclusions:

• About 29 percent of the "free" apps on Android access a user’s location data
• 33 percent of the tens of thousands of free apps on the iPhone access location data
• About 14 percent of iPhone apps access personal contact data
• 8 percent of Android apps access personal contact data – the difference is largely due to the different security measures used by the two platforms.

Some findings are very alarming: an Android wallpaper app transmitted the user’s phone number to a Chinese developer, for no apparent reason. That app was downloaded by 50,000 people.

Another app automatically made the downloader's phone make calls to Somalia, resulting in huge bills.

Furthermore, a large proportion of apps contain third-party code which can interact with sensitive data in ways that may not be immediately apparent to users – or even to the developers of the apps themselves. So-called "third-party code" is generally used for creating advertising or analytics on apps. 47 percent of free Android apps included this third-party code, while 23 percent of free iPhone apps use it. Third-party code represents a security risk because it is difficult to update (and patch a vulnerability) on a global basis. Apple changed its terms of service for the iPhone recently because of its concerns about what third-party analytics and other companies were doing with private data.

By Alex Deane

The coalition has dropped plans to grant anonymity to men accused of rape. This is a climb down from a coalition pledge that said, "We will extend anonymity in rape cases to defendants."

The original plan was to grant pre- and post-charge anonymity. Apparently, the government now wishes to pursue a “non-statutory solution” – which appears to involve asking the media to respect pre-charge anonymity.This just isn’t good enough. Those accused of sex-crimes are judged by public opinion from the start – ruining the lives of people who are eventually cleared of all charges.

It could be argued that allowing those accused of rape to be “convicted” by the media is likely to encourage false accusations. The stigma of the accusations is what incentivises those who make them.

Apparently, MPs believe that granting anonymity to defendants could send a negative signal about those making the accusations. I would argue that it would actually do the opposite. Removing one of the incentives for making a false claim surely adds weight to subsequent claims.

By Andrew Tait

In these troubled financial times, I have been pushing the message that we can be freer and save money all at once – by axing expensive databases and surveillance, by scaling back on CCTV and intrusive state powers, we will reduce the deficit as well as restoring (some of) the freedoms we all want back.

Over at the Telegraph, there's one small but useful demonstration of this simple idea in action:

Local government opinion polls to be axed

A series of opinion polls due to be carried out by local authorities around the country at a cost of £15 million is expected to be scapped for being too costly.

So – £15 million saved. So far, so good. But what kind of questions were residents being asked..?

the polls… ask residents whether they think that local parents are controlling their children properly, and if they have suffered from depression or anxiety. Other questions in the survey, which is due to be held every two years, ask local people about their sexuality and religious beliefs…

But the new Coalition Government is said to believe that the multi-million exercise is diverting cash from other much-needed projects.

Grant Shapps said: “The idea that council bureaucrats are forced to turn themselves into amateur-pollsters in order to ask a range of highly intrusive personal questions about their residents seems entirely out of place.

Spot on, Mr Shapps.

We've bashed the Coalition plenty here. They're still wrong on the NHS Summary Care Record. They're dragging their feet on getting innocent people off the DNA database. They're reviewing random stop and search and 28 day detention when they should just scrap both. But on this, we commend them. Good result.

By Alex Deane