Despite the protest of us "woolly civil liberties" types, and the distinctly unwoolly Joint Committee on Human Rights, the mantra that child protection is more important than privacy has won the vote.
If we were talking about protecting children from abuse, that might be considered an uncontroversial assertion, but when the goalposts have shifted to include the ill-defined state of "social exclusion", the ice becomes thin.
It is in any case absurd to present child protection and privacy as an either or choice. They go hand-in-hand. Privacy is the means by which we control access to ourselves - we decide who will share our lives and to what degree. We use it to define the boundary between ourselves and others.
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