Coalition blocks off child database
Friday, 23 July 2010 12:00 AM
By Ian Dunt
The ContactPoint database of every child and family in the UK will be blocked off from noon on August 6th, the children's minister has announced.
In a major victory for privacy campaigners, all data on the system will be deleted within two months of the closure.
"It has always been our view that it was disproportionate and unjustifiable to hold records on every child in the country, making them accessible to large numbers of people," Tim Loughton said.
The £224 million database was designed as a data-sharing resource to protect vulnerable children but campaigners and experts argued it could never be made secure and would have put children in even more danger.
Privacy activists said that 330,000 people would have had access to the database under the terms of the Children Act 2004.
Phil Booth, national coordinator of NO2ID, said: "NO2ID applauds the minister for taking swift, decisive action. Disposing of what would have been an index to the nation's children is a good start.
"ContactPoint was the very opposite of what a child protection system should be: insecure, unsafe and applied indiscriminately to millions."
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