The Open Rights Group, of which I am a founder member, has announced a call to action to try and prevent the inclusion of Clause 152 in the Coroners and Justice Bill, due to go before Parliament in the near future.

This clause, should it become law, will essentially remove the protections we enjoy under the Data Protection Act and allow Government to mandate the sharing of your personal data with no effective oversight.

This means that data you have provided to the Government for one purpose, with a guarantee under law that it would be used soley for that purpose, would be available for other purposes without the need for further consent.  The other purposes could be pretty much anything – this is not necessarily about security or terrorism or immigration control or any of the other hot-button topics Labour have used over the past few years to justify their more authoritarian and intrusive policies.

I’m not going to go over the details any further in this post, my intentions here are to flag the issue and help in a small way to raise awareness.  There is a lot of information on the Bill and this clause available on the internet, follow the link above to the Open Rights Group site or just trawl through the UK news sites for more.

If this concerns you please consider joining the campaign to get this clause removed from the Bill.  Write to your MP, visit your MP, dicuss with friends, family and colleagues – whatever you have time for.

Update 8th March 2009

Great News – it looks like the proposal has been removed from the Bill (Guardian, Telegraph).  One small victory for common sense and reason.