ContactPoint: A Contradiction in Terms

People have been pointing out that the government's child database, ContactPoint, will actually make it *more* dangerous for children. Now the government is slowly cottoneing on:

Data on about 55,000 children will need to be protected from estranged and abusive family members, or because they are under police protection, according to figures from local authorities.

The protected information - part of the forthcoming ContactPoint child protection database - will include their address and details of the school they attend. ContactPoint users, who The Register revealed yesterday could easily number more than a million, will only be able to access basic data about "shielded" children: their name, age and gender.

In other words, some of the most vulnerable children must be excluded from ContactPoint, because its security is now recognised as insufficient - even though the whole point of ContactPoint was to *enhance* protection.

ContactPoint - and any centralised database - is simply not fit for its purpose: chuck it, people.

Labour's Data Delusion

There is a common misconception in Labour's love of super-duper databases: that more data is better. In fact, as any fule kno, what you want is the right data. Here's a great comment that unpicks that delusion in the context of its insane ContactPoint scheme:

There was no shortage of information about Victoria. There was a chronic lack of wisdom and judgement in interpreting the information that was already available. Victoria’s case demonstrates just how difficult it can be to pick up on abuse. It would be far better to concentrate the limited resources available on retention of experienced child and family practitioners and on thorough investigation of children already known to social services, rather than flooding an over-stretched system with low-level data about every child (up to 50% of the child population) who might need services.

ContactPoint: What is it Good For?

Scrapping:

Anderson disagrees: "If you allow large numbers of people access to sensitive data it's never going to be secure. You can't protect it. ContactPoint should simply never have been built."

This is Prof Ross Anderson, and he knows whereof he speaketh.