UK's Child Protection Database will be used to abuse children

[mundens]

The people quoted in this article rightly complain about the civil liberties issues, but they miss the fact that because so many people will have access to this database, police, medical personnel, teachers, social workers, and even council workers, that it will inevitably become compromised by the very people that it is designed to protect children from.

Paedophiles have jobs. Some of them will work in the police, as doctors, for the council, or for the social services. There will be people building and maintaining this system, project managers, developer, testers, DBA's. All IT projects, most especially government ones, have some level of insecurity. That the data exists means it will, at some point, become freely available. A predator will be able to access this system and pick a likely target based on the information stored, and know exactly how to approach them.

Frankly, I don't see how keeping a database of children is ever going to be useful to protect them, except in the sense of "protecting them from themselves".

Comments

[repton-infinity.livejournal.com]

Especially since, as is standard practice in the UK, the data will be transferred to unencrypted CDs or laptops, and then lost :-/