There is some strange legislation changes happening in the U.K. It is an amendment to the Data Protection Act 1998.
Taken from computer weekly: “…an ‘information sharing order’ to share personal information. This seems to circumvent whatever purpose the information was gathered for; for example, child protection data could be shared with police, benefits officials or your local school. (……) Furthermore, the sharing process can include publishing that personal information.”
Just to give an example:
Part 8 — Data Protection Act 1998 (c. 29)
50A Power to enable information sharing
(1) Subject to the following provisions of this Part, a designated authority may by order (an “information-sharing order”) enable any person to share information which consists of or includes personal data.
…
(3) For the purposes of this Part a person shares information if the person–
(a) discloses the information by transmission, dissemination or otherwise making it available, or
(b) consults or uses the information for a purpose other than the purpose for which the information was obtained.
This means “mission-creep” is acknowledged as ok… not good. This provides an opening for the further sharing of any personal information that we have originally shared for a specific purpose, including our DNA data. After this change, there will be another amendment in a few years time, and bingo before we know it the DNA data of our children is stored and used for all sorts of unethical practices. Although of course, today we see them as so, in 20 years time, they will probably be accepted as normal.
Read more from computer weekly.
Thanks to ARCH blog for highlighting.