The BBC published an article on their news website with the emotive headline ‘GCHQ could “grab” UK shopping data, committee told’. The author states ‘Internet privacy campaigner Jim Killock claimed it could even include things like the Tesco Clubcard scheme.’. No, surely not?

The state authorities access this and similar information more or less on demand as demonstrated in this article where a fraudster was caught by the police cross referencing loyalty card purchasing information with CCTV footage. Good job too, many of us are thinking.

However, the GCHQ article seems to suggest that if a state ‘intelligence and security organisation’ uses the same data then our freedom is somehow at increased risk. But of course the state apparatus insists that everything is legal. Well they would, wouldn’t they?

So let’s just examine where we are on this:

  • It’s OK for the police to use this information to try to catch scumbags like the conman/fraudster mentioned.
  • We’re uncomfortable with the idea of a state agency, GCHQ, accessing all this information and cross-referencing it looking for patterns to identify anti-state actors.
  • Millions of us hand over all this information to huge commercial organisations and rely on them not to abuse this data. Knowing that these organisations may not be completely trustworthy.

We should be far more worried about Tesco and all the other stores we use and online trans-national companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google and all the others which gather up all the information that they’re allowed to rather than about GCHQ or the NSA accessing that same information. Why do we trust the likes of Walmart better than we trust the NSA/GCHQ? Is it because of their excellent IT security track record in protecting our information? I think not. The big stores don’t protect our information adequately and the NSA employs IT contractors who leak their information to the media.

Don’t entrust your personal information to anyone that you don’t absolutely have to.