Tom Whitehead writes in the Daily Telegraph about errors in Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) checks:

The true number of people who were wrongly linked to crimes or misrepresented is ten times greater than annual Home Office figures suggest, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

The scale of errors made in background checks was only revealed through Freedom of Information requests.

Annual error statistics published by the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) regularly suggested around 200 people are wrongly accused each year.

However, those figures only refer to errors made directly by CRB staff when carrying out checks and disclosing information.

Once errors made by other agencies who contribute to background checks, such as the police and education officials, are included, the figures run in to the thousands.

Since 2003, a total 19,551 disputes over inaccurate CRB checks have been upheld.

For 2010/11, the official inaccuracy figure stood at 172, but the new statistics show the true level of error for that year was 2,343.

Rowena Mason writes in the Daily Telegraph:

Plans to force households to have energy smart meters installed have been shelved over health and privacy fears.

The Government had promised that every household would have a smart meter by 2019 in a £12 billion programme to stop gas and electricity bills being estimated.

Officials are devising plans to allow people to reject the smart meters, which communicate remotely from households to energy companies.

The move is a victory for campaign groups and backbench MPs, who raised concerns with ministers that the devices emit electromagnetic radiation 24 hours a day and cannot be turned off.

Privacy campaigners were worried that half-hourly data on energy usage collected by smart meters could give clues about people’s way of life, such as when someone is on holiday, at work or asleep. Sources in the Department for Energy and Climate Change said the proposal was shelved to avoid the programme getting “bogged down” in lengthy legal disputes.

Michael Cross writes on the UK AuthorITy web site:

Concerns about personal privacy appeared in a “significant” number of responses to the government’s consultation on transparency and open data, the Cabinet Office revealed today.

A summary of responses to last year’s consultation on “Making Open Data Real”, says that respondents “expressed concern that the consutlation failed to address the interaction between personal data… with open data, and the potential for open data to have a negative impact on confidentiality and privacy.”

The officil consultation summary and all the responses can be accessed via the Cabinet Office web page.

Stephen Adams writes in the Daily Telegraph:

A national DNA database is needed if the NHS is to capitalise on advances in technology and offer personalised medicine to all in the future, advisors have told the Government.

At the moment the health service is just starting to offer patients genetic testing, for example to tell if they will respond to certain cancer fighting drugs.

But in the future the technology is likely to be central to many areas of healthcare – from testing pregnant women’s blood to check the foetus’s risk of Down’s syndrome, to tracking disease outbreaks.

Sir John Bell, chair of the Human Genomics Strategy Group, said to deliver ‘genomic’ based medicine in the future, a national database was necessary.

Speaking yesterday (Wednesday) to launch a report by the group to make this happen, he said: “It’s almost impossible to go forward with the whole personalised medicine agenda, unless you have this database.”

The report, “Building on our inheritance – Genomic technology in healthcare”, includes this recommendation:

DH in partnership with BIS and other relevant partners should develop proposals to establish a central repository for storing genomic and genetic data, and relevant phenotypic data from patients, with the capacity to provide biomedical informatics services and an open-data platform that small and medium-sized enterprises can build upon.

Lori MacVittie writes at ZDnet:

The term big data has come to mean big headaches for IT organisations and big problems for consumers. Privacy is a growing concern as more and more data is not only collected but voluntarily shared by consumers in exchange for free access to applications and functionality.

Those wondering how much sites such as Facebook might know about them have to jump through hoops to find out and are likely to be surprised by how many personal details websites actually store.

The TV documentary Erasing David, screened on More 4 in 2010, detailed an attempt by film maker David Bond to do just that — find out how private his identity really is. After deliberately disappearing for a month, he hired detectives to track him down.

Before his disappearing act, Bond spent weeks trying to find out just how much information various websites held on him. Big data took on a whole new meaning as he sat at a desk, poring over more than 1,000 printed pages from Facebook alone.

The UK government is proposing to make part of that discovery process easier on the consumer and their wallets with its Midata initiative, whereby consumers would have access to some of their data held by private organisations.

The government is promising protocols to handle privacy or consumer protection issues — but also stresses that this is a private-sector initiative and it will not be hamstrung by rules and regulations.

For anyone who hasn’t yet seen it, the thought-provoking film “Erasing David” is now available on DVD.