And the winner is… Staff Fraud!

Crazy Canucks

 What’s not to love about Canada, eh? Amazing scenery, great food, Neil Young, its total ban on nude sunbathing – the list is nigh on endless.

So it came as a surprise last Friday to read about a Superior Court in Ontario ruling that Canadian police can now use Internet Protocol addresses to find the names of people online, without need of a search warrant.

Justice Lynne Leitch was presiding in a child pornography case in which Bell Canada released the IP address of a south-western Ontario man to police as part of a child sexual exploitation investigation without a warrant. Leitch apparently accepted the Crown’s argument that there is ‘no reasonable expectation of privacy’ in cyberspace and that an IP name and address are not ‘biographical information one expects would be kept private from the state.’

Whilst I support the need to prosecute suspected child sex perverts to the fullest extent of the law, Canadian civil libertarians are justified in being up-in-arms about the implications of Justice Leitch’s ruling. Everyone’s ten-digit IP address is the key to not only their online identity, but the entire history of where they’ve been on the web. Nature-lover that I am, you can be certain I’m never going to Google the words ‘Canada’ and ‘beaver’ ever again!

With a mass surveillance, ‘super database’ still apparently on the UK Government’s ‘To Do’ list this year, developments in Canada this past week unfortunately make me all the more pessimistic about privacy rights – both here and abroad.

Promises, Promises

Meant to mention this last week, but congrats to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), on the new Data Protection Promise. Good to see the safeguarding of personal data getting a much-needed boost – particularly as 99 data breaches (no, not Luftballons!), were reported to the ICO in the final quarter of 2008 alone.

According to ICO research, 95 per cent of companies are apparently strong advocates of the Data Protection Act. Which is just as well, as an estimated 70 per cent of consumers are concerned about the amount of personal information companies hold about them, say Ofcom.

I have a couple of minor quibbles with the Promise, though: (i) it commits signatories to what I regard as being minimum ‘good practice’ standards; and (ii) as we’ve all seen more gaffs in recent months than the North Atlantic tuna fleet, shouldn’t we, as responsible data handlers, be trying to raise the bar and do more?

But I don’t want to throw the data protection baby out with the ICO bathwater. With an estimated 100 million items of misaddressed mail still providing too ample opportunity for fraudsters each year (address forwarding fraud constituted a disconcertingly high 36 per cent of total ID fraud cases in 2008), let’s hope advocacy translates into tangible data hygiene and security action in 2009.

Strike Me Pink

Wildcat strikes at Lindsey, Grangemouth and Sellafield and over the use of foreign labour; The Good Childhood Inquiry announcing that ‘the aggressive pursuit of personal success by adults is now the greatest threat to British children’ and the Prime Minister railing against the rise of neo-protectionism in Davos… Was it just the bottle of Grenache I downed last night or are these disparate events symptomatic of something?

Namely: Fear.

Fear of losing one’s job; fear of not being able to pay the mortgage or put food on the table; fear of not being able to keep up with the Joneses – fear is plaguing the British psyche at every turn. Fuelled by a tabloid media diet of unadulterated gloom, more than just the temperature seems to have turned sub-Arctic here on our little island these past days.

I’m hoping that Total’s subcontractor agreements are indeed meeting minimum UK employment conditions and that the strikers’ response is a knee-jerk one. Either way, this situation needs to be resolved ASAP as the world is watching. GB’s standard ‘when the going gets tough, the tough go on strike’ predilection just won’t cut it in the new, post-credit crunch world, I’m afraid.

As for our kids… At the risk of sounding like an old softy, it kills me to think we’re impairing the potential of the next generation by straight-jacketing them with a success-at-all-costs mentality which is utter nonsense. Where will it get them? Just ask Bernard Madoff.

I like the perks of success as much as the next CEO, but we all need to foster a greater sense of community if we're to get through the current market mire. So good on you, Gordon, for trying to put the best spin on our prospects for the world's financial elite in Davos over the weekend. But from the look on CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour's face I saw in one news clip, methinks the economic dynamism you're touting needs a hell of a lot of further nurturing.