Largely unnoticed about a month ago the EU launched PRIME, a four year project to

"Develop solutions to empower individuals to control their private sphere and manage their identities; "

and

"Trigger persuasive deployment of privacy-enhancing identity management solutions. "

-according to the website. Theoretically the EU Commission has been pushing PETs (privacy enhancing technologies) for some time and one of the principles is to minimise the amount of personal data collected. There are two fundamental problems:

1. The Blair/Blunkett and by extension the EU Council of Ministers simple solution to terrorism - collect as much personal data about the entire population of the world as possible, in the hope that you can kid people into believing you're actually tackling terrorism;

And

2. Though we all say, when asked, that we are concerned about our personal privacy, we do very little actively to protect it e.g. how many people think about the privacy implications of their supermarket store cards.

Ah well, at least somebody is working on it.