A quick follow-up to yesterday's post about the Home Affairs Committee's report on the ID Cards scheme: Dr. Edgar Whitley at the LSE was good enough to point me to their press release on the same topic. As the LSE press release notes, the HAC report is not the first to recommend that any national scheme should be based on a 'data minimisation' principle. After all, as our CPO Michelle Dennedy says of personal data: "If you don't have it, you can't lose it". That must prompt a rueful smile in many an organisation.
Here in Japan they don't have a national ID card scheme. The views expressed at today's meeting* were that it would be very hard for such a scheme to win the trust of the Japanese citizen - one significant reason being the possibility of doubt about whose benefit the scheme is being run for: the state or the citizen. There would also, I heard, probably be an instinctive aversion to anything which represents such a potential threat to personal privacy.
As one of my companions put it over dinner, "It used to be the case in Japan that there was really no such thing as personal privacy... particularly in the domestic environment, for instance. But now that it's normal for each person in a family to have their own room, and children can use mobile phones to get completely independent, unsupervised access to the internet, email and messaging, attitudes to privacy have changed fast. We're still learning how to deal with the new possibilities."
*It was held under the Chatham House Rule, so I can't disclose who the participants were or who said what... but I have good reason to suppose that this is a well-informed view of the situation.
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Introducing personal privacy via information privacy seems to be turning the European experience of extending personal privacy into cyberspace on its head. Perhaps it means that privacy will ultimately, and perhaps paradoxically, be more strongly protected in Japan?
Interesting stuff.
Posted by John on June 09, 2008 at 07:54 PM GMT+00:00 #