Intelligence and accuracy
I do hope 'they' are more adept at using our (sorry, their) information than the Home Office team which calculated the new Police funding amounts from the wrong data because the filenames were almost identical.
A while ago I 'researched' (ok, 'Googled') instances where innocent people had been convicted on the basis of fingerprint evidence alone. One was a USA Police sergeant who had witnesses that she was several hundred miles away, with fellow police officers when she committed the crime. it turned out that the fingerprint database was wrongly attributing the actual villain's fingerprints to her.
It is all very well having petabytes of 'data' to play with, but you need to be sure that it is actually accurate.
As for protecting people from harm, I suspect that may of the people with access to the data are just looking at it, and have no remit to prevent paedophiles abusing children, etc. As the data was not officially collected, it does not exist, and therefore cannot be used without prejudicing the ability to obtain it. (You don't believe me? Well, ask a former resident of the Kincorra Boys' Home if he got 'value for money' from the Security Service's knowledge of what went on there. Not MI5's finest hour.)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
