Re:Viewing 2003 - Privacy and monitoring

It's been a year dominated by terms such as ID theft, data protection and biometrics. But what have the powers that be been doing and what part does the tech community play in their plans? Jo Best looks back...

When it came to privacy, the government was keen to give a little with one hand and take back a hefty wodge with the other these past 12 months.

Come 11 December, the government decided to put everyone's rights to have their details kept from spammers. Well, their personal, not business, details. And only from spammers in Europe, not their transatlantic counterparts.

On the other hand, the government decided to put in place legislation to force communication service providers to record details of every phone call made, email sent and website visited by the public and businesses alike, after pulling a couple of crafty moves in the House of Lords to make sure the proposals – less than popular with consumers and ISPs alike - made it to law.

Another piece of legislative wrangling that had a similarly sticky path through parliament was Blunkett's baby, the ID card scheme. The idea of introducing a biometric identity card was on and off again more times than Elizabeth Taylor's wedding ring, with the Home Secretary feinting putting his plans on the back burner in November only to see a trial of the compulsory cards announced in December which will test out the feasibility of using various biometric devices including iris and facial recognition and fingerprinting.

Public opinion was divided over the subject, with privacy groups up in arms, online opinion going over the Home Secretary's head and the man – and woman – in the street not caring too much either way. The same couldn't be said of Blunkett's friends on the front benches – Foreign Secretary Jack Straw branded the ID scheme a "debacle" in a letter to his cabinet colleague.

Nevertheless, we can expect to see the ID card gracing the wallets of the great British public before the end of the decade. Compared to another ID scheme announced this year, the UK's effort is mere ID minnow – the Chinese announced an ID card system of their own to be dished out to one billion citizens, complete with a genetic sample of its holder.

Biometrics has also caught the attention of banking bosses, with Nationwide continuing trials of iris and fingerprint recognition to improve security. Nationwide execs weren't overly impressed with the results and they binned it in favour of an electronic signature recognition scheme.

While companies and governments alike have been been claiming biometric technology is just a security measure with no ulterior motive, issues around people-tracking have been raised.

Tracking, albeit in another form, has been turning heads in the tech world all the same - from bosses who want to track staff using their mobile phones to bust-ups over the rights and wrongs of supermarket surveillance, in the form of RFID tags.

The start of the year saw several big brand names opt to put the tags – which allow consumers or every day objects to be tracked at close range in order to enable shopper behaviour or stock levels to be monitored – on various goods, including Gillette, Benetton and Tesco. All three decided their goods could do with a bit of RFID to either track merchandise or stop the light fingers of shoplifters.

Shoppers, however, who found themselves lingering too long in the canned goods and falling under the less than sympathetic eye of the local security guard were less than impressed at the Big Brother-like implications of the scheme, causing all three of the companies in question to jettison trials at a rate of knots.

Wal-Mart, the behemoth of the supermarket world, owner of Asda and beloved of (some) Americans, went quite the other way, first announcing that it had canned its plans to roll out RFID in stores, then changing its mind and deciding to spend $3bn of its shoppers' hard-earned cash on radio tracking tags.

Another tech outfit that will be rubbing its hands at the prospect of RFID taking off is mechanics' mate McNealy and his friends at Sun. The vendor is opening up an RFID testing centre in the Scotland for retailers to try out their tags and make sure they comply with privacy and regulatory obligations.

The US Department of Defense also decided to get in on the act, plastering resources with the tags. With the exception of sand and liquid. Very sensible.

It looks like governments and big name brands aren't the only ones with a hankering for tracking, however. When silicon.com covered the emergence of services designed to help bosses track their staff using the employees' mobile phones, there was a lot of interest from readers – so next time you go for a cigarette break, make sure you know who's watching...

For more on this subject, see our current Protecting Your ID special report.