Selling our soul?

Good news on two counts:

(1) The report out today on privacy of data is recommending decisive action to disallow the selling of electoral roll information by local councils. In today's modern web-enabled world, the abuse of such data leads to the calls and emails that we all label 'spam', and frankly blights our days.

(2) A source at the council tells me that they'd much rather not sell the electoral roll at all, and whilst they only do so to a small handful of organisations each year, and make very little money from it, it's something they currently are obliged to do under existing legislation. With 40% of voters opting out, it's not much use in the grand scheme of things, but it would still give tens of thousands of names and addresses to recipients.

I'm completely in support of a ban on this activity.