Uk 2021 Census

[Thirsty Relic 209]

16 hours ago, Baron99 said:

Difference between 2011 & 2021, the introduction of the Data Protection Act 2018. 

 

It would be illegal, even for the UK Govt to share your information with a third party without your agreement before hand. 

 

 

The 2018 Data Protection Act was only an update to the previous versions of 1984 and 1998, which were in place before the 2011 census.  The same basic provisions were in place then as well. 

 

I also think that there must be some sort of exemption for the Census, but am not qualified to say what that would be, but I'm sure that far more people see your returns than you would expect to see them.  As we have seen in so many case of data leaks over the last few years, it only takes one person, or one mistake, and all the data is in the public domain.

[El Cid 214]

32 minutes ago, Thirsty Relic said:

I also think that there must be some sort of exemption for the Census, but am not qualified to say what that would be, but I'm sure that far more people see your returns than you would expect to see them.  As we have seen in so many case of data leaks over the last few years, it only takes one person, or one mistake, and all the data is in the public domain.

The thing about the census is that the information is not made public for 100 years. So you cannot look at the census from 2021 untill 2121

[the_bloke 17]

17 hours ago, Thirsty Relic said:

I remember a year or so after the last census someone writing into a newspapers saying they had deliberately mis-spelt their name and had unsolicited mail from various companies with this name as a result, so they knew it was leaked from the census.  I remember one paper (quite correctly) saying they had committed an offence - but it goes to suggest that it is NOT always anonymized.

 

 

 

Strange that no further action was made though. After all, if that was the case, then the data was illegally leaked and would have been news, yet I can't find any stories about it online.

[Thirsty Relic 209]

On 25/07/2020 at 15:04, Thirsty Relic said:

I seem to remember a major Tory politician a few years ago suggesting they would not need the 2021 census as they could get all the information they needed from other official sources, and freely available social media such as Facebook.  I thought at the time that  wouldn't work for 3 main reasons:

1. that would mean the combining of databases from different bodies (such as tax, housing. DSS etc) which as I understand it would breach the Data Protection/GDPR laws
2. not everybody is on social media (it seems strange that this needs pointing out to some people, but it does).
3. can you really see them turning down an information gathering exercise?  We all know that they then not only use the data themselves for the next 10 years for social planning etc etc, but also make loads of money from selling parts of it to the many companies willing to pay for it (supposedly anonymized ).

 

If anybody is interested, this is the Tory politician who, in 2011, was predicting the end of the Census as we know it:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/7882774/National-census-to-be-axed-after-200-years.html

This year, it is the Government's chief statistician:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51468919

 

This year, it's the Government's chief statistician:

 

[Longcol 597]

9 hours ago, Thirsty Relic said:

it was the last census - and I don't recall even being asked for an email address - even if I'd got one then.

 

I for one will be taking great case what information I put down on the census - the minimum I am by law forced to.

I'd conclude they were telling porkies then.

[max 13]

On 26/07/2020 at 23:13, Longcol said:

That doesn't make a lot of sense unless they'd deliberately mis-spelt their e-mail address and opened up an e-mail account in the mis-spelt name.

There was no indication that it was an email address, the original post you quoted mentioned unsolicited mail. I'm guessing they meant snail mail in which case one wonders why they didn't receive unsolicited mail before.

[altus 538]

9 minutes ago, max said:

There was no indication that it was an email address, the original post you quoted mentioned unsolicited mail. I'm guessing they meant snail mail in which case one wonders why they didn't receive unsolicited mail before.

It didn't say they hadn't received unsolicited mail before - just that they'd received some with the false name they'd used on the census form. If someone is concerned enough about personal data being sold from the census to use a false name they are likely to do the same thing with other organisations and might well have used the same false name before but forgotten about it.

[Thirsty Relic 209]

I've tried to google the story, but without success.  I recollect that the person concerned decided to miss-spell part of his name, expecting the info to be passed on and used, and to check if he was correct.  It would stand to reason therefore that he would not have used that mis-spelling elsewhere.  He reported what he regarded as proof that his details from the census were passed on. 

 

 

[L00b 441]

Given the averred links between HMG and Peter Thiel's Palantir (US data mining co. given full access to NHS Covid19 patient data), not to mention Dom Cummings' multiple AI companies-owning chums, you shouldn't worry too much about putting any information down on the Census form: chances are, HMG and consorts, foreign and domestic, already have that data anyway 

 

Besides, given the very numerous online platforms in which most anyone fills in basic personal information for access and use, and modern data mining capabilities, chances are -again- that any information retention, withdrawal, falsification and other privacy-seeking approaches would be redundant.

 

I'm still getting the occasional ambulance-chasing chatbot cold-calling my mobile phone every now and then, asking me if I've received all the compo I was/am entitled to after a car crash over 5 years ago (timeline IIRC, it was a long time ago)... That is, after moving countries 2,5 years ago, and that's calling my professional phone supplied by my employer in the foreign country, the (UK) number of which doesn't appear anywhere online (company website or email footer) and which I have never registered on any other website or online resource, than the company's bank (for 2FA purposes with the company issue credit card). Just tells you how powerful that data mining 'in the ether' must be.

[Thirsty Relic 209]

There are moves afoot to force us all to fill this years form in online.  Many people are not online and may be forced/pushed/recommended to do it online.  I can see pensioners being forced to go to council offices/libraries and put personal and private information onto the internet that they would rather not.  Yes, I know that manually filled forms are then read onto the computer (presumably OCR), but would a pensioner want to have to tell a stranger a mass of their private info so they can input it online for them?

Yes, by law we've got to get the stuff online (and hopefully anonymized) for planning purposes, but the US census data was made available by hackers 2 or 3 years ago, (in addition to many other organisations suffering similar problems recently).  All I see is yet another IT failure about to happen.

 

We can only hope that stringent control measures are put in place this time and peoples names and addresses are stripped off as soon as possible.  Then the planners have aggregated data to work with, and we are all are at least partly protected from misuse of the data.

 

 

[Baron99 778]

At the end of the day, if anyone believes any organisation, including local & central government, is not holding their information securely or suspects they are misusing the information, they have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office. 

 

https://www.gov.uk/data-protection/make-a-complaint

[apelike 10]

7 hours ago, Thirsty Relic said:

Yes, by law we've got to get the stuff online (and hopefully anonymized) for planning purposes,.....

But is that really true anymore about planning purposes? It may have been in the past but I'm not sure about it anymore. This government and governments in the past 50 years despite having the available  data have not really acted on it. We know from that data that the population has increased and we need a big overhaul of our infrastructure as most of the infrastructure is over capacity and about to break. Does that data also show we need HS2 or Trident or many of the other expenses that get approved over the former?