delusionofgrandeur

In possibly the most inexcusable bought of stupidity ever seen in the field of privacy, the outgoing Italian government deliberately published the income figures for every tax paying Italian citizen on a publicly accessible website.

This move was made under the auspices of a crack-down on tax evasion. Well, nothing would make me want to avoid paying tax more than keeping my income details of a public website!

The website was apparently up for several hours and attracted huge interest but was taken down after a formal complaint was received from the Italian privacy watchdog.

It has been suggested the data was published due to a case of ’sour grapes’ by the outgoing centre-left government. If so, Italy clearly has a huge problem with the way their government operates. The government’s duty is presumably to protect it’s citizens but this move will have endangered many. I should imagine that within moments of the data becoming available, any theif worth their salt would have been poring the data for the juiciest and least protected targets.

If I run a wooden spoon award this year, the Italian government would be a front runner.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Economy, News, Politics.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.