no surprise - the government want to sell our data to private companies, up to now they've been giving it away on a random basis.

I wonder if that means they have a few other data breeches to tell us about, and where scared about getting clobbered by there own new rules.

We got the scrapping of the Data Protection Act dropped from the Coroners bill (i.e. clause 152), which means there would actually be a chance the government would be fined for losing all our data, so it's very important to the government that the powers to impose those fines never see the light of day.

watchdog with teeth?? It'll never happen... or the government will neuter it immediately.

Giving the ICO sharper teeth would be like giving a monk a bigger todger.

Neither would be used.

That is that it would be included in the Bill. This government has been very keen to get things written into to law with the fine print down to the SI. Not usually this slow with the statutory instruments.

However for the purposes of this law I think HMG is exempt. OTOH I'm rather doubtful that its contractors (who for some reason *always* seem to be working with a copy of the whole live database) would be.

EDS, CSC, IBM, Thales and of course Capita *might* be a little more circumspect with our data if they actually risked something if they lost a copy of it.

The way to sell this to governments is not as a safeguard on data protection, which they don't seem to care about. Its the revenue earning opportunity it represents.