Our place to talk – an independent website for supporters of the Liberal Democrat party in the UK.

The most-read independent website by and for Lib Dem supporters. Not paid for by trade unions or millionaires.

Advert

Author Archives: Caspar Bowden

The Independent View: Data preservation instead of data retention

By Caspar Bowden | Tue 30th April 2013 - 9:17 am

Ubiquitous personal communication technologies are here to stay. Because of exponentially falling data storage costs, two contrasting states of society can be envisaged. The default will be either that individuals determine whether and when their history is recorded, subject to exceptions, or data will exist about everyone all the time. This is the policy choice between data retention and preservation, and it is a sharp dichotomy.

Over two decades the UK has been in the vanguard of a core group of five European countries seeking systematic Internet surveillance. A blanket retention regime gives law-enforcement an “Internet Tardis” to go back in time and find out retrospectively what anyone was thinking about, whom they were talking to, and where they were. The dichotomy between retention and preservation is really about whether we want to give government such a “time machine” to scrutinize everyone’s past behaviour without prior reason.

Continue reading »

Posted in The Independent View | Tagged data retention | Leave a comment

Most Read

Op-eds

Stop the Birmingham busking ban (David Gray)
Observations of an Expat: Ukraine and Trump (Tom Arms)
A year after the ICJ ruling, the UK is still complicit in Israel’s unlawful occupation (Lucia Messent)
Should the government lower the voting age to 16? (Michal Siewniak)
Why Liberals should keep one eye on Corbyn’s new wheeze (Alan Grant)

Advert

Recent Comments

expats
@Tim Rogers 19th Jul '25 - 7:52pm... John Donne..."No Man is an Island".....
Simon McGrath
The Duke of Westminster often comes up. He is one of the reasons why George Osborne brought in tax on discretionary trusts - 6% of the trust value every 10 year...
Andrew Melmoth
- Anders Larson There is no mystery about how the Duke of Westminster was able to largely avoid inheritance tax. He used on legal structures established by the...
ANDERS LARSON
@Simon R there were probably many schemes used in combination, some domestic some international. But that doesn't answser the core problem, which is that even i...
John McHugo
@Chris Caswill - you mention the "Middle England test". Middle England is outraged by what has been happening in Gaza - it is also outraged by 7 October, but do...