WRITTEN ON March 9th, 2008 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Foundation of Trust, Identity, What do we want?

Demos were dishing out copies of their 2007 For Your Information report at Thursday’s ID speech. I hadn’t seen it before, and it’s quite good, tho it doesn’t condense very well into its executive summary.

It focusses straight on the issue of mechanised compassion and rules-based discrimination. That, the authors argue, is why we need a politics of personal information: there’s a tension between empowerment through information and control by information. It recommends that people must be put at the centre of their own information flows and protect their personal information. Government should get its act together on the issue, apply “cash-handling” disciplines to personal data. About the ID Scheme they say

There needs to be a serious, renewed debate about the identity card scheme, with the kind of engagement that should have happened at the start of the process. Otherwise, the scheme should be dropped.

Interesting piece of work. All these pieces of work – Crosby, FYI, the OECD piece – suggest a maturing of the debate.

I reckon the one piece of text that didn’t add much to ID life last week was the Home Secretary’s speech – the Demos director Catherine Fieschi’s intro was a whole stack better. And surely the seminal ID event of last week will turn out to be the Microsoft-Credentica deal.