The lady's for turning

We've taken the odd swipe at Jacqui Smith over the last few months, so it only seems fair to applaud her decision to scrap the Home Office's planned über-database of communications data.

The database would have collected data on all electronic correspondence, such as the time, date and length of communication (and, of course, who contacted whom).

Humble Jacqui said that she recognised the public's concerns that a giant database would be a further step toward a surveillance society. And, in a nice little turn of phrase, she said, "To be clear, there are absolutely no plans for a single store."

No longer any plans, Jacqui, no longer.

Of course the cynics will say that Labour couldn't possibly get away with ploughing hundreds of millions of pounds into a deeply un-popular government IT project in light of last week's austerity budget.

We couldn't possibly comment.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that ISPs are now responsible for intercepting and storing the data that crosses their networks. To this end, the Home Office have earmarked £2 billion to help ISPs to expand their storage capabilities.

Mobile and fixed line operators will be required to process and link the data together to build complete profiles of every UK internet user's online activity. Police and the intelligence services would then access the profiles, which will be stored for 12 months, on a case-by-case basis.

Don't be surprised if even this plan is quietly dropped by the Conservatives after the 2010 election.

A final point - John Reid, the frankly terrifying former Home Secretary, argues in an opinion piece today that communications data is vital to identifying serious criminals. In his short but predictably manipulative piece, he kicks off with a tear-jerker about a murdered 17 year old whose killers were brought to justice by communications data. This, he says, happened in 2007.

So you see, Reid shoots himself in the foot before he's reached the end of his first paragraph, by showing that police then already had adequate access to communications data.

He then comes up with a classic piece of patronising lip service: "Used in the right way, and subject to important safeguards, communications data can play a critical role in keeping us safe."

Presumably, these would be the safeguards that ensured only 36,989,300 pieces of personal information were lost by the government in 2008. As for using it in the right way, it's as if he hadn't heard of the scandal of local authorities using the RIPA legislation to spy on dog fouling and catchment areas.

If we really do need a giant central database, they'll need to do a lot better than this to convince the public.

Facebook moves the goalposts

This week we've heard more rumblings of discontent from Facebook users - they're unhappy that the social networking site has moved the goalposts over the much-hyped "user vote" on changing Facebook's Terms and Conditions.

The story first emerged last February, when Facebook casually mentioned that it had granted itself a licence to all its users' content in perpetuity, even if they deleted their account. Cue a predictable collective wailing and gnashing of teeth from millions of users who, almost by definition, are pretty clued up on the web.

The backlash prompted a partial backdown from Facebook, who attempted to mollify its members by saying that it would agree to drop the proposal if 25 per cent of users voted against.

This week, that threshold has quietly been raised to 30 per cent. What's more, a significant number of Facebook users have been disenfranchised by the decision to allow votes only from those who've used their accounts in the last thirty days.

Simon Davies of Privacy International is so confident that the 30 per cent threshold won't be achieved that he's promised to eat his shorts if he's wrong. (As if there wasn't already a good enough reason to get voting - Ed.)

At the time of writing, 73.11% of respondents have voted against Mark's Terms of Use, but unfortunately "only" 284,473 have voted in total - barely a tenth of one per cent of Facebook's 200 million regular users.

So Zuckerberg is really expecting 60 million users to vote? And isn't he concerned that the respondents, while still so "few", should be so overwhelmingly opposed to his plan?

Here at Data Grub, we're rather disappointed with the preternaturally young Facebook CEO. Changing the rules like this is pretty childish, after all, and we reckon he could do much better.

Zuckerberg really needs to take lessons from a master manipulator, such as the late Saddam Hussein or even the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il himself. We'd love to see the People's Democratic Republic of Facebook announce that 99.8% of members had voted in favour of the rule change, on a 100% turnout.

Read Zuckerberg's plans for Facebook here.