Quanto Stipendio! The Italian Government and Personal Privacy
The Italian tax authority has taken a refreshingly open view about publishing information...
One of the worries that privacy campaigners express is that once government holds information about you there is nothing to prevent them from using it as they see fit. No matter that something is illegal, or that there are promises information will strictly used for one purpose only, a new government and changed law can fix all that. The classic example is internment of Japanese-Americans during WW2, where census information was used to track people down despite strict rules that such data would not be used in this way.
The outgoing Italian government have given further credence to this concern, and in a fairly spectacular manner. According to the BBC, they have published the declared earnings and tax of every Italian citizen in order to 'improve transparency'. I'm going to go out on a limb here, and suggest that this might not have been the purpose for which it was collected. The irony is that the outgoing government was elected to, amongst other things, sort out what the BBC described as a 'notoriously lax attitude' towards paying tax in Italy, and this will hardly help!
Moving on quickly before I stumble into a discussion about Italian attitudes towards taxation, let me point you to the full write-up of our seminar 'Building Trust in e-Government' that has now been published. Interestingly, it doesn't recommend mass disclosure of personal and private data of your citizenry.
Search this blog
Comments (1)
Leave CommentLabelling this move as idiotic would be an understatement of the degree of ineptitude involved in the management of government agencies in Italy. But, being Italian myself, I can tell you that embarassing situations like this are pretty normal over there. I've read the story on the Italian newspapers. In reality, the published data did not involve only the declared tax amounts of all Italian taxpayers: it included full disclosure of taxpayers' names, addresses, names of spouses and children, and much more. I very much doubt this level of information disclosure "already exists all around the world" (as the Italian government says). On top of that, the private data watchdog itself (ironically, appointed by the government) was never consulted, and it was thanks to the watchdog that the website was shut down after a few hours. Nevertheless, the data is already circulating around the internet, available to anyone, including kidnappers who will now be able to ask a ransom that is proportionate to the victim's declared income.
Report Comment
Post a comment