CCTV, Supermarket Cards and Privacy

The Royal Academy of Engineering has come out with a report on privacy and technology.

It points out that if you have supermarket collecting vast amounts of information, through loyalty cards, and they're also selling life insurance services, "what will they be able to do in 20 years' time, knowing how many donuts we have bought? ...Complex databases [the proposed National Identity Register] can suffer from mechanical failure or software bugs."

The report also highlights that CCTV cameras can record digital images that could be stored forever. With increased processing power, you could "search back in time through vast amounts of digital data to find out where people were and what they were doing." The Royal Academy is calling for greater control over the proliferation of camera surveillance and for more research into how public spaces can be monitored while minimising the impact on privacy.