Beg to Differ
On Saturday, I got a letter from one of the three major US credit companies. The text of the letter stated that there had been a "change" introduced on my credit record (which is frozen, BTW and I recommend that for everyone) that was either a change in my home address, my U.S. social security number or my name. The letter would not identify the actual piece of data in question.
On Monday (2 days ago) I got to the bottom of the alleged discrepancy. It was a misspelling of my French last name.
The source? My LinkedIn profile. I had done that intentionally, which is relatively easy with my surname, which is not computer friendly.
Although I am not an expert in UK privacy laws, I believe that in the UK because of the original UK Data Protection Act and its EU companion act you may be more protected there than here in the US. Here and in other parts of the world, your credit, your employment and your passport are already merged together with all sorts of autonomously generated derivative analytic social information and original sensor data to make your composite digital footprint or fingerprint. Even the US military are using Facebook in recruiting decisions. Employers in the US use Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn and credit data to create a mosaic for employment decisions.
They are also working merging on publicly available medical information into the mix, so people that blog or place in Facebook or Flickr a picture with medical related information might feel the effects of assumed medical derived information in their digital footprint analytics.
One example is Facebook and LinkedIn, where searches of recent facial digital photographs that suddenly show you as bald (especially women) without an attached social statement (I've decided to cut my hair) will trigger the probability of chemotherapy and all the issues associated with that. They've done that already with tattoos and pictures of captions like "here am I with so and so, coming out of the hospital"....
