The Times reports:

Boris Johnson is facing his first big policy obstacle as Mayor of London after the Information Commissioner objected to his plans to map crime in the capital street by street…

Quoth the Evening Standard:

In the last year [longtime bus enthusiast Rob McCaffrey] has been questioned twice by the police and had to give all his personal details after people who saw him innocently snapping buses on public roads reported him.

The Financial Times of 23 June 2008 reports:

Some marketing managers are prepared to give out key private customer data such as sexual orientation, political affiliation and credit card details to third parties in an attempt to increase sales, warns a survey today.

The US-based Ponemon Institute, a privacy research group, also found that almost two-thirds of the marketing professionals it surveyed admitted consumer information had been lost or been stolen over the past two years.

The survey… covered 900 data security and marketing professionals…

Some managers said they would also disclose data about ethnicity and religious beliefs.

…marketing managers never reported data losses or thefts to customers in 90 per cent of cases, as they thought they were not required to do so.

From PC World:

One of the U.K.’s largest insurance companies has scrapped a high-tech vehicle insurance plan that tracked drivers using GPS (Global Positioning System), watching where they drove, their speed and at what time of day.

The BBC reports:

The credit card details of up to 38,000 customers of clothing firm Cotton Traders were stolen following a hack of its website…

The firm has not confirmed the size of the breach but it has acknowledged the site was attacked early this year.

It said Barclaycard was contacted as soon as it learned of the attack, and most cards were stopped in January.

The payment industry’s trade body said it was serious because hackers accessed details for “card not present” fraud… a specialist police force was investigating…

…customer addresses were also stolen in the hack.

From a Home Affairs Committee press release:

In a report released Sunday, the Home Affairs Committee calls on Government to “adopt a principle of data minimisation” in the information it collects and holds on citizens - it should collect only what is essential, to be stored only for as long as is necessary-and it should “resist a tendency to collect more personal information and establish larger databases”.

ZDNet.co.uk reports:

[GNU founder Richard] Stallman criticised the use of open-source software . . . in the online payment system for the Oyster contactless cards used on London’s underground rail network. . . . He also warned that the RFID chip on the card might be read at other times, allowing information to be gathered besides details of Tube and bus travel.

An internal BT report on their trials of the controversial Phorm advertising system has been leaked. Alexander Hanff of the No DPI blog has the details:

I recently acquired an internal BT report regarding their covert trials of Phorm (then called PageSense) in September 2006. I read the 52 page document earlier today and the evidence it presents left me with a knot in my stomach…

Via the BBC:

The new work tracked 100,000 individuals selected randomly from a sample of more than six million phone users in a European country. . . . The researchers said they were “not at liberty” to disclose where the information had been collected and said steps had been taken to guarantee the participants’ anonymity.

From the BBC:

More than one in four adults in England will have to register with child protection authorities next year, under an expanded safeguarding scheme.

Anyone working or volunteering with young people will have to register.

The government says 11.3 million people will be on a database, with registration costing £64 per person.