As part of the Every Child Matters initiative and in effort to protect children the government has launched ContactPoint, a database containing the personal data of every child under the age of 18 in England. Here's the official program description:
While I applaud the efforts of the government to act in a proactive manner to protect children, I feel that a database containing sensitive information--including the address, date of birth, parents work info and social services history---of minor children is somewhat misguided and ripe for abuse.
Schools, teachers, parents, non-profits and other children advocacy groups have spent a great deal of time and energy working with children and developing digital literacy and safety programs designed to teach children not to give strangers their personal information.
A skilled hacker can bypass trying to cull information out of children over the web and go directly to the mother lode of personal information. What's even worse is that parents do not have control over what information about their children is in the database and are unable to remove content that they feel is inappropriate or too personal. Moreover, don't have the right to remove their children from the database.
Sadly, in many ways the damage has been done. Even if the government, under pressure from parents and other child safety advocacy groups were to scrap ConnectPoint, the information has already been collected and is floating around in the ether of the Internet.
Much like Pandora's Box, once the information has been released, it will be nearly impossible to get it back, especially when already over 390,000 people already have access to the database.
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