Was unavailable to make this week’s tutorial (as well) so thankfully my tutor had collated everything we discussed! (Thank youuuuuu!).

Question: Should governments be able to collect more or less data about us?

Reasons For

• Can use more data to predict and prevent serious crime.
• Can collect data on traffic flow, movement of diseases, etc. and learn from it to improve infrastructure and health
• Government has more resources and responsibility which would help them keep data safer than corporations, won’t sell it
• Data could be used to perform better background checks which would minimise abuses of the data by employees
• Government already have census data and others necessary to run elections, so there isn’t much extra risk in sharing more data. They already know where you live.

Reasons Against

• Information which could seem harmless to give now could be abused by a later government (eg. Rwandan genocide, where identity cards which mentioned ethnicity were given in 1935. In 1994 the identity cards were used to determine which citizens were killed in the genocide)
• Government would likely outsource the storage of this data, probably wouldn’t be more secure just because it’s the government.
• Insider attacks or employees abusing data.
• Most points for the data storage assume the goverment will always act within the best interests of the people. A malicious government would have lots of power to abuse with more information.

Analysis

This is an interesting question.
If we take a step back from thinking about the government… Who has our data?
It won’t be long until you realise that, pretty much everyone has your data.

We know the tech giants do - Microsoft, Apple, Google, Samsung, etcetera.
But also probably every smaller company does too - or so at least has the capability to gather your data.

With people being so reliant on their smartphones every day, they naively press “I Agree” to all the terms and conditions of applications and services they use.

And in those T&Cs, there’s most likely an obfuscated but legally valid clause that allow them to collect your data - Photos, search history, location history, music interests, activity, and the list goes on.

With that said, for someone to disagree with the government collecting our data - one should first consider who else they are giving their data. Sure the government could do ‘more’ with the data - but we shouldn’t be walking around pointing our pitch forks at just the big people.