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Offensive to say we would misuse data
• HOMES for Islington (HfI) is extremely surprised at the allegations made in the Tribune last week and feels there has been a strong misinterpretation of the facts (Fury at Big Brother sex snoop, June 15).
We are funded by public money and have a responsibility to put the needs of our communities and residents first. It is a role we take very seriously.
We undertake diversity monitoring to help us better understand our residents and to tailor our services towards them. This is not a new policy and we have, in fact, been undertaking diversity monitoring for some time to help us improve the services we provide.
Any information we gather from residents is data protected and used by HfI only. To suggest that we would pass that information on or exploit it in any way is highly offensive, not only to us as an organisation but also our tenants.
We vigorously deny the implication that we use or would use sensitive information in this manner. We are wholly committed to the best interests of our communities and tenants.
ANN LUCAS
Chair of Board, Homes for Islington
• HOMES for Islington’s intention to store personal data of its tenants is yet another database to probe into personal lives and manage personal data, another chip away at our right to privacy.
If the state or anyone else is to intrude into my privacy they better have a good reason. HfI’s database has been sold as a measure to “tailor (our) services to meet the needs of residents”. I sincerely question this and suggest this is more to do with bureaucratic convenience at the expense of the tenant’s privacy.
Indeed, this is a further example of the growing database state or “transformational government”, to use the government’s spin.
The key component is the centralisation of our personal data to a National Identity database, which will issue us with an ID number and ID card, the keys to our life histories, accessed by countless officials and passed to anyone – and, if Brown has his way, sold to anyone.
Does anyone trust a government IT scheme enough to believe our personal information will be safe? Does anyone believe we will escape the vast expense that the identity scheme will cost?
The database state is ever growing – biometric passports, fingerprinting children in schools, the NHS’s flagging IT scheme to centralise our medical records without privacy, roadside fingerprinting and recording car journeys using automatic number plate recognition. HfI’s database is another effort to remove our right to privacy and increase the control which officialdom will have over us.
CAROLINE DAY
Coordinator, Highbury NO2ID
• CONCERNS about ever-increasing surveillance of people’s personal lives are well founded. Forcing someone to divulge his or her sexual identity is already a common law offence, and quite rightly so. Everyone has a right to respect as to how a private life is led.
As if this new impertinence were not bad enough, HfI’s equal opportunities form, which states that “it is a requirement” that it be completed, is already unlawful. Under the Data Protection Act, the information being sought may only be collected with the individual’s consent or, if without this, then on a voluntary basis.
While fair and equal treatment for all may be a laudable objective, it is best achieved through regular consultation between the respective parties, not through intrusive demands that are found unacceptable.
HfI’s claim that it is only doing this in order to enhance equality is a complete fraud. As it is a private company that survives on state handouts it needs to fill its shopping trolley as fully as possible before taking it to the checkout counter in order to receive the maximum government funding and freebies, no matter what anyone may feel about the matter.
Tenants are not inanimate objects to be moved around for another’s profit but human beings with a living personality.
JOHN MCPARTLIN
Highbury Grove, N5 |
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