The legislation merely ensures that they do it in an orthodox and bureaucratically approved manner.Greater Manchester Police, for instance, are paying 30p per inquiry to a commercial credit reference agency to track down suspects through a database that may be more current and more detailed than the Police National Computer. The system, whose main jobis to choose targets for junk mailshots, holds information on family relations and financial arrangements. Detectives claim that the data is useful for finding out whether a suspect is living beyond his visible means. On the other hand, credit r ecords are a notorious dog's dinner: the information they contain is often wildly out of date or inaccurate.Harnessing commercial data to the power of government is dangerous.

You have a statutory right to see credit records, and make corrections if necessary. But if you were marked down as a bad egg by the police because of the same error or misinterpretation, you would not find out. Police units can always shelter behind the immunity that the law gives to "operational material".Tax investigators have received data from banks, captured by cashpoint machines. The Inland Revenue is justifiably interested in learning whether tax payers who claim exemptions for living abroad are really living abroad. Mapping their use of cash machines tells them, but at the cost of further obliterating privacy, and the separation of powers that seemed natural when the public sector and private sector were more distinct than they are today.The Data Protection Registrar is cogent and conscientious.

The Registrar has dissuaded the Child Support Agency from passing excessive information between estranged parents, and has scored some moral victories. But the Data Protection Act's limitation onwhat government bodies can do with data - that they must hold data only "sufficient to fulfil their statutory duties" - is so vague that it may be interpreted to suit. Until data protection law is rewritten in terms of civil rights, and beg ins truly tocontrol policy, determining what kind of information may be collected on people and for what purposes, the legislation is no more use than a draught excluder without a door.. Computer games should be like wars: much easier to start than to stop, and gripping even when they are at their most confusing and pointless. There is something intrinsically wrong with a game that needs a manual you have to keep by you to play.