It used to be easy to go through life without leaving any trace: records of your birth or death might not survive if you were poor or the parish was careless; only the rich paid income tax, so your life was silent, unannotated and soon forgotten.
But not any longer: now everyone is followed by a snailtrail of electronic evidence. The computers holding records of you range from health boards and insurance bodies to government departments, banks, chemists, doctors. . . even the milkman. "There probably isn't a person in the country that doesn't have information kept about them on computer somewhere," says Assistant Data Protection Commissioner Michael O'Donovan. "If you're an adult, if you're working, if you're unemployed, if you live any kind of normal family life, you'll find on reflection that you're on probably anything from 25 to 35 upwards computers."
"Practically everybody who has this kind of information will tell you that they don't release the information to anybody else," says Ciaran Clissman of Teltec Ireland, which was set up by Forbairt and is part of the Seismed project for security on medical data.
"By law, by custom - and if you believe what they tell you - none of the information is pooled," he says. "There are very strong customary, ethical and now legal constraints on individuals and on organisations preventing them from releasing information about individuals to other people or to other organisations. Of course, if a regulatory body or the police can force open the locked jaws of discretion, that's another story."
Some of the information about us is volunteered in one way or another - for example, when you take up various supermarket offers of cards. And if you use the Web or email, you're likely to a trail behind you (see stories below). Most people are not too worried about this - the worst experience you might have is to be deluged with unwanted "offers" through email, or with mailshots through the letterbox.
But do you really want your government - or anyone else - to hold a dossier on you which may contain all kinds of information about your tastes, your buying, your values, your health and even your children's school records?
"Information which is not particularly sensitive will continue to be shared more and more," says Ciaran Clissman. "The question is whether you can build up a dossier telling you more than somebody is comfortable to have known about them, out of the innocuous bits and pieces that people give away freely."
Michael O'Donovan points out that the Irish Data Protection Act gives people the right to have themselves removed from any mailing list, by writing to the company concerned. But if you use the Net, the Data Protection Commissioner's powers do not extend to other countries.
The Data Protection Act gives you the right to obtain a copy of all information kept about you on computer by anyone except a private user - by the Government, or by people such as doctors, dentists or insurance companies (there are certain very limited exceptions to this right, the main ones relating to active criminal investigations or the collection of revenue).
To obtain a copy of your information, you should write to the "data controller" - the person who has that information on their computer. There is normally a £5 fee, but your letter is a formal request under the Data Protection Act, and you must be given a copy of everything the computer has on you within 40 days.
The Data Protection Commissioner recently found it necessary to raise the question of the state's right to share information among its agencies, after the publication of the Integrated Social Services System Report. It had envisaged the Departments of Social Welfare, Revenue and Agriculture sharing information.
"We were making the point that it wasn't good enough to make such a fundamental change as this without transparent debate," says Michael O'Donovan. "There was almost a hint that it was proposed to do it by administrative decision - senior officials deciding to get together and do this, using their own judgments about the efficiency gains and the success in reducing dole fraud and tax evasion - obviously all very good things. But the view we took was that it was a step too far to be taken without open debate and political decision. Only the Oireachtas has the right to make changes on this scale of importance."
Many countries including Ireland are now issuing identity cards, either for all citizens or for specific groups such as social welfare recipients. Computer industry observers say the next logical step could be smart cards holding medical records, driving and insurance status etc.
A computerised passport card is within the realm of possibility too, but the technology raises as many questions as answers.
"The American Internal Revenue Service tried to get people to make tax returns by Internet, but they got their fingers burned," says Michael O'Donovan. "People's financial information was hacked into and was fairly seriously abused."
The immediate choice facing us is quite stark: what kind of access do we want others to have to information about us, where does privacy begin, and where does it end?
Lucille Redmond is at: lucred@indigo.ie
Assistant Data Protection Commissioner Michael O'Donovan is at: info@dataprivacy.ie.