The UK needs a single privacy commissioner, and not the tangle of officials it is creating to police the area, an alliance of pressure groups claimed yesterday.Public bureaucrats called privacy commissioners always seem a little paternalistic.
Terri Dowty, Director of Action on Rights for Children (ARCH), warned of the uncoordinated and ineffective proliferation of commissioners now operating in this area. Dowty made the call on behalf of a number of other campaign groups, including Privacy International, Genewatch UK and NO2ID.
My kind of privacy commissioner would hand out fines to people loudly discussing their private lives on their mobiles in public places rather than trying to inject themselves into the privacy decisions best left to the rough-and-tumble of individual informed consent.
If the surveillance state has gotten too big, why not just roll it back rather than creating an entirely new innovation-limiting bureaucracy?
Nevertheless, the changes proposed in the article represent a step toward a more rational system.
