On and on and on the Public Services Card rolls despite almost all the wheels having fallen off, even the mandatory but not compulsory wheels that have been hastily repaired and reapplied to the shambling mess as it drags itself from pothole to ditch to pothole. The potholes and ditches in this case are rules,…
September Roundup
Autumn roared in. The Public Services Card rolled on despite one minister admitting in a roundabout way that there is no legal basis for what’s currently happening and another cooing softly that the thing which should have been done before the project started many years ago will certainly be done “very soon”. Massive amounts of…
August Roundup
August was a busy month as the already cracked veneer on the surface of the Irish state’s shambolic data acquisition and sharing projects shattered further. We were treated to a senior government minister denying she was splitting hairs while attempting a precision distinction between ‘mandatory’ and ‘compulsory’. Elsewhere it was (bad) business as usual for…
The Knowledge Gap [KitBits 17.11]
I was prompted to write this post, which had been rolling around the back of my head for quite some time, by this series of tweets by Simon McGarr. Do read them all. Privacy and data protection is not a dry legal issue, nor an incomprehensible technical thing best left to boffins. Data protection at…
End The Wordplay [KitBits 17.10]
The Irish Times reports this morning that a woman in her 70s has had her pension payments stopped because she refused to get the State’s certainly-not-mandatory Public Services Card and add herself to the national biometric identity register which the State is definitely not building. No doubt some ministers and officials in the departments of…
July Roundup
Please ensure you’re sitting comfortably folks as this was quite a month, both at home and abroad. 1. The Central Statistics Office Really Wants To Track You In one of the stranger privacy stories we’ve yet seen in this country, the Irish Times reported that the Central Statistics Office desperately wanted to build a comprehensive…
The Whys And Wherefores Of An Identity Register [KitBits 17.7]
The Stream on Al Jazeera covered the Indian government’s Aadhaar identity system yesterday. Get yourself a hot or cold beverage and devote half an hour of your time to this. As you watch it, here are some things to note in the context of the Irish government’s determination to push ahead with their voluntary-but-to-all-intents-and-purposes-mandatory Public Services…
May Roundup
This month there’s a fair bit about advertising and the power which combining disparate buckets of information about you offers to the world’s advertising companies, large and small. The Irish state’s continued quest to issue three million biometric-capable identity cards it signed a contract for without explaining why it thinks these cards are needed is…