Personally think this is another lovely example of why professionals need to be brought in who know what they are doing.

The best measure we have is the Oxford Internet Survey. The 2007 figures show “ex-users” at 5% and of those 21% cite “worried about your privacy” as a reason for stopping using the Internet and 18% cite “had bad experiences with spam or viruses”.

Interestingly 81% of ex-users and 65% of users agree with the statement “people who go on the Internet put their privacy at risk”. This may be connected with 34% reporting they had “received a virus onto their computer”, 9% had “bought something that had been mispresented on a website” and 2% had had “credit card details stolen via use on the Internet” (figures relating to receiving spam/phishing etc are high, but considerably down on 2003/2005 … ISP filters are better).

Assuming “would refute” is intended to mean “disagree with”, this straw-man suggestion is compound and includes “the public has lost confidence in the internet”, which they clearly have not, so the response is strictly correct.

HMG often plays this game. From their viewpoint, there is little point in spending money on an issue that the public is unaware of, so equivocation is the best policy.

Guess it was too good to be true.

“So is the Government ignorant, stupid, or in the thrall of some special interest group?”

I would disagre with Ignorant, there have been way to many Gov IT projects going wrong for any Gov Minister to plead Ignorance.

Although Stupidity is what the person on the street is likley to say, again it is very unlikley that to get to ministerial level that you are a stupid person.

Which leaves your “Special Interest Group”, I would prefere to say “Vested Interest Groups”. Marketing is one of the largest businesses in the world and limiting their raw resource (peoples info) is an absolut anathma to them. So that group alone is going to apply considerable presure via the usual routes. Likewise a number of high tech organisations want to get as much access to personal info as possible for other probably less benign reasons (at the least think of “employee reliability” checks etc).

However you did leave out two other reasons which are “Indiferance” and “Political Charecter assasination”.

Most Whitehall mandarins do not give a stuff about personal privercy. In fact just about every Elected Gov since the second world war has been presented with reasons why the U.K. should have ID Cards and other Databases of information. It was not untill the current incumbrents came to power that they so willingly swallowed the hook (and also used it as a way to avoid bankruptcy of the Labour Party).

What is so surprising is the likes of Jack Straw who in a previous government actually went trawling after National Insurance records on various people for purley political reasons is so keen on makeing large DBs of as much personal info as possible (unless he is still up to his old tricks). Likewise why is the Mayor of London via TfL so keen on collecting any data on people and reserving the right to make it available to whom so ever they think fit including Journolists (see TfL’s entries with the Data Protection Registra). “Uncle Ken” has actually been given a very derogatory award (Big Brother 2003) by Privacy International for these activities,

http://www.privacyinternational.org/bigbrother/uk2003/

Oh and David Blunkett got a “lifetime menace” award.