Contradictheory: A buffet of personal data up for grabs?

We need to appoint an independent oversight body where people can lodge complaints if their rights to data privacy are violated. —AFP

It must have been about 25 years ago when I attended a talk about the power of integrating databases, and back then we were lucky governments hadn’t quite figured it out yet. But obviously all that has changed now.

The speaker was from Canada, and he illustrated the concept with an example: On one hand, the government struggled to catch welfare recipients who were quietly nipping across the border to work in the United States. On the other hand, it would have been trivially easy to catch them if someone just thought to cross-reference the welfare database with weekday border crossing records.