phone lookups

[John R T Brazier]

>> John replied:
>> I don't see the basic difference: traffic data is freely available to
>> some Governmental
>> agencies. By your argument it shouldn't matter if it's available to a
>> few more.

>David replied:
>Nope, you are aiming at a strawman; if it would be legal for a company
>to sell you that data, it must be legal for you to possess and post it
>(unless it is copyrighted to them, in which case it is a copyright
>violation to repost. Not going there though :).
>As it isn't legal for the government to sell you my traffic data, it
>can't therefore be ok for you to get it for free (or to buy it)
>There may of course be a DPA consideration here - as the data on that
>disk must constitute a searchable database of user-identifiable data,
>surely therefore (unless I am reading this wrong) it should require
>registration ?

My point was that I haven't bought the data, so I don't have a right
to it. Currently, some agencies don't have a right to traffic data
(without warrant). I'm saying the fact that we don't have rights to
the respective data sets should make us similar, in that we shouldn't
have information leaked to us. From where I'm coming from, the reasons
why we don't have right of access are relatively unimportant.

There are a barrel-load of DPA considerations here, not least the one 
regarding if the data on the BT disk was 'fairly collected'.

TTFN

John B