On September 2nd, Zone-H published a news  about British Institutions that were about to create a huge database containing information on English children. This initiative was strongly criticized because of the implications it could have in case of data exposure.

In last 2 months several studies have been carried out to analyse the situation and on Wednesday a report draw out by a team of scholars, experts in law and education, and charities coordinators was presented to the British Information Commissioner.

The report, known as Children’s Database: Safety and Privacy , was aimed to provide the commissioner with a comprehensive view of current and proposed database and of their effects on children lifestyle.

The plan of constructing a Universal child Database in England, goes back to Children Act 2004 and specifically , the version they are setting up right now  will include information about children belonging to the Child Protection Program and children signalled on the Child Welfare Program.

These two Programs are completely different because whereas the first one concerns 50.000 children and teens that are “at substantial risk of significant harm”, the second one is about 3-4 millions children that are at some disadvantage such as poverty, ill-health, poor school performance and so on. 
The purpose of this archive is to discover and intervene on low-level problems before that they will turn into high-level problems. That is , in other words, an attempt to focus on crime prevention.

But there are some foggy points in all this issue, that are well considered by the report:
first of all the fact that this classification based on health, social and environmental elements could produce a sort of “e-discrimination”, since institutions would act as if they could be able to predict which children will become delinquent on the basis of analysis and opinions of several public-sector workers in different moments and contexts.

Indeed, sharing this kind of data without a strict criteria could bring about prejudicial measures as it happened in the “disturbing” case of a nine-years old that was wrongly taken into care after social workers misunderstood medical information.

The report then, focus on the aspect of Privacy: indeed, families privacy and autonomy isn’t taken into account at all and what’s more this invasion isn’t justified by a system that has been created to provide personalized aid and support: it seems to be just a matter of surveillance.

Another concern highlighted by the report is about Data Protection.

Considering the number of data leaks that have been discovered this year, we can hardly say that British children’s data are safe. The element that could provoke most problems on this proposal is that Databases are accessible by many different people in the public sector at different levels and they are shared through "sharing software" in public offices all around the country.

For example, the ASSET database was introduced in 2000 across the youth justice system in Egland and Wales. It is a portfolio of structured assessment tools designed to build a profile of each young offender and draw up statistics on the correspondence between crimes and criminal’s nurture.

But there are many doubts about the effectiveness of these statistics.

The related ONSET assessment tool is intended to help identify young people considered at risk of offending. Both the ASST and the ONSET profiles are held on the YOT’s information management system and can be shared electronically using software such as the YouthJustice Board’s YISPMIS (YISP Management Information Service).

 Even not mentioning the implications that such filing could convey for children that could be looked by institutions as potential criminals , we wonder how a sharing software is supposed to guarantee that these data won’t fall in malicious hands, since the risks connected to these tools are known to most of us: data leaks, social engineering,  are just few example of the attacks that could jeopardize the data of over 4 million british children and eventually expose them to high risks.

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