Jacqui Smith's Data Cost

For a moment I thought Smith might of back tracked for some "degree" of privacy worries. Having done a little web searching, alas no it's money, she reduces the cost of her database from £12bn to £2bn, by pushing the work and costs over to the service providers. The Independent are reporting phone and internet bills may have to rise to pay for collecting and sorting private information. Effectively if the government don't cover all the costs with our tax, we'll pay for it via our phone bills as well and what's the betting that happens.

We don't just stand to be swindled there though, ID cards are also in the spot light, minsters want to cut the unpopular plans as they look for £9bn spending reductions, ID cards are estimated at £5bn cost. Though Computer Weekly has a very interesting post on the costs to us. £650m worth of contracts have been awarded and producing passports and ID Cards aren't so easily separated. As the government intends to regain their cost via us paying for them. Everyone needing an ID card reduces the cost, as it's shared between the whole population. Scraping ID cards means only passports will be used to regain the expense, as not everyone has a passport it could easy be a £200 plus bill for those that re-new and get one. Yet we still stand to get ID cards technology within our passports, unless they cancel the contract.

At least there's one positive point to this recession, it curbs Smith's ability to create database upon database of information on us. Big sister is still watching though, as she raids our piggy banks.