An interesting new report has recently been released from a senior researcher, Ian Brown, from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) . It charts the cost and scale of data collection and the methods used in data preservation and maintenance. As listed on the OII web site; the report has also been receiving a lot of press (view report).
Press: The Database State report has been covered by the Times Online: 10 government databases ‘will break the law’; The Guardian: Right to privacy broken by a quarter of UK’s public databases, says report; BBC News: Call to scrap ‘illegal databases’; The Independent: Quarter of UK’s databases are ‘illegal’; The Telegraph: One in four government websites illegal, and Reuters: Quarter of state databases “should be scrapped”.

craigbellamy.net » Private Sheriffs in Cyberspace: Jonathan Zittrain OII Event: London, 19th May 2009 said,
May 21, 2009 @ 6:45 pm
[...] to the talk, Ian Brown, a Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute (and author of the recent report Database state), asserted that the relationship between Citizen and State and Cyberspace needed to be [...]