Looks like the uk government has found an entirely novel angle on the concept of "transparency"!<p>Between that and the NHS data and their reaction to Snowden, the meaning of transparency in the uk is clearly "we'll release all your private individual data while keeping secret everything that we do"!
No offence to HMRC staff but I'm not sure if I really trust the Civil Service to decide what "generates clear public benefits" and if there are "robust safeguards in place"!
I'd rather an all or nothing approach to these kind of information sharing arrangements.<p>If information is to be shared, it should be made freely available to all, not just to corporations that are able to shell out large sums for it.
This story broke last night on the Guardian website:<p><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/apr/18/hmrc-to-sell-taxpayers-data" rel="nofollow">http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/apr/18/hmrc-to-sell...</a><p>Although it's not clear that it has come from an official HMRC statement (I couldn't find anything on its website), the timing of this -- the Friday evening / Saturday morning of the Easter bank holiday weekend -- feels like someone finding a good time to bury controversial news.
Here we go again.<p>Probably some greedy fuck of a civil servant (probably one of Cameron's ex-Eton buddies or friendly conservative slime like Guake) working out how to sell out our infrastructure to industry and make a larger bonus this year whilst doing fuck all.<p>Hopefully the last non-political unit (the ICO) will stamp on this quickly.
It would be nice if UK.gov could make the public financial data of firms available in an open way.<p>You can buy a firms financials from the government for £1 a company, or buy a full dataset for several thousand pounds. For little people wanting to do statistical analysis, that is unaffordable.<p>An awesome startup here, duedil, somehow got the rights to the data, and makes it available for viewing through a lovely website. But giving some company monopoly on public data is really messed up. Good on duedil, but the government is really failing by putting them in that position.
If you think this stuff is worth signing an online petition over: <a href="https://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/dont-sell-our-tax-data" rel="nofollow">https://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/dont-sell-our-tax-...</a>