Nameless bureaucrats prepare to share your data

The Guardian said this reverses a previous convention that public bodies have to prove a legal reason before data can be shared. It may also breach the UK's Data Protection Act.

The new rules will allow data to be shared if it's in the "public interest". The plan is being spun as being in all our interest so that if you moved house and told the council, a heap of other government departments would know about your move too.

The government would base such a scheme upon the existing national insurance number.

The move has been bitterly opposed by pressure group Privacy International, which lobbied against the government plan to foist ID cards on all of us.

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