WRITTEN ON March 24th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Data nitwittery, Foundation of Trust, Transformational Government, We told you so..., What do we want?
We’ve started a new category called “We told you so”. The Times on ContactPoint:
Security flaws have halted work on the internet database designed to hold the details of 11 million children and teenagers. The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) admitted last night that it had uncovered problems in the system for shielding details of an estimated 55,000 vulnerable children.
These include children who are victims of domestic violence, those in difficult adoptions or witness protection programmes and the children of the rich and famous, whose whereabouts may need to be kept secret.
And in an analysis piece ContactPoint’s failure is a symptom of a wider disease:
Technology moves fast. Governments do not. Those in the know are not in the least surprised that ContactPoint has been halted. The Government’s databases are in a mess.
A scathing report, published by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust yesterday, found that the most of the Government’s databases have “significant problems and may be unlawful”. ContactPoint was one of the systems said to be “fundamentally flawed”. ContactPoint’s failure is a symptom of a wider disease.
The problem is that the Government is rarely at the forefront of technological advances and therefore is liable to be sold shoddy goods. The report stated: “One noticeable effect is that the UK public sector always appears to get sold whatever technology or methodology is just going out of fashion in the private sector.”
The Times piece finishes on a particularly pertinent note, quoting Anne Marie Carrie, the executive director of family and children’s services for the borough of Kensington & Chelsea. “If someone wanted to maliciously track down a child they had given up for adoption, this would make it easier for them to find their address and school,” she said.
“Some people are seeing this as an IT issue but, in reality, it is a child protection issue,” she said.
That seems like a really prescient comment. Is amassing personal data on vulnerable children, accessible by so many really going to increase child protection? Common sense – coupled with the knowledge of cases of public sector insiders using personal data for their own purposes – seems to suggest not.