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The UK Information Commissioner has just published a report on the UK Government's plans to link up most of the public-sector databases that contain information on children. The report was written by experts from the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR), who conclude that aggregating this data will be both unsafe and illegal.

The report, 'Children's Databases: Safety and Privacy', analyses databases being built to collate information on children in education, youth justice, health, social work and elsewhere. Although linking the databases is supposed to safeguard children, the report's authors point out that extending Britain's child protection systems - from the 50,000 children at substantial risk of serious harm to the 3-4 million children with some health, education or other welfare issue - means that child protection will receive less attention.

The project will also feed information into police systems that try to identify children likely to offend by scoring various risk factors (socioeconomic status, medical diagnoses such as hyperactivity, school conduct reports, and whether the child's father has been in prison). This carries a serious risk of stigmatising innocent children, and may also undermine children's and patents' trust in doctors, teachers and other professionals.

The report's authors also conclude that the systems will intrude so much into privacy and family life that they will violate European data protection law and human rights law.

Report "Children's Databases - Safety and Privacy" (22.11.2006)
http://www.fipr.org/childrens_databases.pdf

IT systems designed to protect kids will put them at risk instead (22.11.2006)
http://www.fipr.org/press/061122kids.html

(Contribution by Ross Anderson, EDRI-member FIPR, UK)