Loss of privacy costs pennies

Reporter: Jim Williams
Date published: 03 April 2015


THE FRIDAY THING: CAN we not have secrets anymore? There used to be something called privacy, but it seems the privacy police have turned a blind eye to both our future prosperity and our health secrets.

Do you want your medical details of your piles, bladder problems, deafness and lack of control over your wind out in the open, as it were, or do you, like me, believe discussion of our medical conditions should be shared only between our doctor and ourselves?

Just to show that nothing is sacred any more, there are unscrupulous folk out there who are buying health information about us. Our medical data used to be secret but not, it seems, any more. And to add insult to injury, secrets about the state of our mind, body, eyesight and hearing are being bought for as little as a few pence and sold to some nosy parker who sets out to earn a few pennies from what should surely be information reserved for us and our maker.

To rub salt in the wound, folk who have pensions are also having the details sold to criminals for similarly small amounts.

Surely anyone having their pension attacked by conmen and rogues has the right to some security and to not see the buyers of his or her private information make money out of this awful scam.

At least the news of these outrageous attacks on private information and on much-needed pension pots seems to have woken up Nick Clegg (remember him? He was deputy prime minister), who has called for the scam merchants to be sent to jail.

Hopefully they will be incarcerated with someone who produces horrible bodily smells.



AS a perhaps sideways glance at the upcoming election, the so-called “black spider” letters written by Prince Charles to the Government more than a decade ago are to be published after a long-running legal battle that reached the Supreme Court.

The Prince of Wales, maybe more than just a little eccentric, should have the same rights as anyone to send out letters on issues that concern him. And there are a good many things that concern him.

To some he is a nuisance but to many others he represents the Royal Family with a daring panache and a sometimes reckless desire to say it as he sees it. His 66 years as a member of the Royal Family have not dimmed his belief in his right to have his say, whether un-royal folk like it or not.

His charitable work and keen interest in climate change and marine preservation along with a huge catalogue of good deeds done certainly qualify him to express many points of view.