Giving personal details to an agency leads to slanging match.

[Old Greg]

To which a simple letter on your Ltd's letter head will suffice.

And now you have conveniently moved away from your ridiculous DNA statement.

The agency has no legal obligation to accept a letter from your company. This is business.

[Cirrus]

If you want to be arsey with clients, there's nothing whatsoever wrong with that. The issue was the original poster wanted to say 'no' but with some sort of get-out-of-jail reasoning (or so it seemed). The post was pointless. It's a personal choice. It was bound to invite taunting.

If you ask things like "What is the higher rate tax threshold?" you're likely to get a constructive answer. If however you say "Should I pay a reasonable level of income tax" you well get more probing responses. Don't blame the people replying; blame the people who post stuff that asks for trouble.

[billybiro]

And now you have conveniently moved away from your ridiculous DNA statement.

The DNA statement was only made to illustrate that there's a "thin end of the wedge" at work here. Today it might only be a passport, but tomorrow? And the day after?

I mean even today most passports contain biometric data. What if your client not only wants to photocopy the relevant photograph page from your passport but also wants to retain that biometric data too, so forces you to submit to an iris scan or somesuch?

All it would take is some proclamation from some authority (government etc.) that they've discovered that passports are all "insecure" so they need to collect ever more data from us - all in the name of "security" and "preventing terrorism". Then commercial businesses think that they also need to retain such excessive amount of data in the name of "proving" an individual has the right to work in the UK (which may or may not actually be the case).

You're being incredibly naive if you think this creeping personal data collection and invasion of privacy wouldn't ever happen. That fact that you've got clients insisting on collecting this data from contractors when they bear no legal responsibility for ensuring they have the right to work proves that it's already happening.

And the fact that there are an endless number of data breaches (and more happening every single day), many from companies who should know better and who are largely "trusted" (on blind faith, mind you), to keep their data secure. Well, I'd rather not have my personal data splashed all across the public internet thank you very much. I wonder how much of yours is?

The agency has no legal obligation to accept a letter from your company. This is business.

Quite. So what? I never said they did. This is business, and both parties are free to negotiate on their own terms.

[northernladuk]

Awww mods mods. BB left me a swearword in my rep

Maybe he should have tried feckwit instead. Hard to be offended by 6 stars really.

[Old Greg]

The DNA statement was only made to illustrate that there's a "thin end of the wedge" at work here. Today it might only be a passport, but tomorrow? And the day after?

The Skeptic's Field Guide: Slippery Slope

The slippery slope fallacy assumes without evidence that if we take a particular step which in itself doesn’t cause a problem, it is nevertheless the first in a series of steps that will lead inevitably to some undesired outcome. This fallacy in reasoning is often called the “thin end of the wedge” argument. An example might be the view that if marijuana is decriminalized, then this will inevitably lead to decriminalization of harder drugs. Or: “If we allow simulated depictions of sex on TV after 9.30pm, it won’t be long before such things are depicted early in the evening when young children are watching.”

Showing a passport does not lead to giving DNA samples.

[WTFH]

If you deal with multinational clients, it's very common that you'll need to show your passport or other photo ID to get on site.
It's part of being a serious contractor.

I'll give you an example from a client site visit I did yesterday...
1. I had to provide passport info and car registration number before going
2. I know of at least 2 security cameras which were used specifically to capture an image of my face
3. As it was a site visit, I had to be escorted through all security doors and was not allowed access to systems without explicit permission

Now if I had refused 1 & 2, I would not have been able to get on to the site.

My issue with the whole "don't tell them your name Pike" attitude of at least one poster on here is that it means when you go on site you have to sign in each day, you have to be taken through security doors to get to where you need to be, etc. Basically, working on a client site where you refuse to provide information means you are being supervised, you are being directed and you are being controlled.

[billybiro]

The Skeptic's Field Guide: Slippery Slope

Showing a passport does not lead to giving DNA samples.

Ahem.

"The slippery slope fallacy assumes without evidence that if we take a particular step which in itself doesn’t cause a problem, it is nevertheless the first in a series of steps that will lead inevitably to some undesired outcome."


Except that we've got decades of evidence that the government, commercial businesses and other organisations are collecting more and more of our personal data.

Slippery Slope - Non-fallacious usage

[Zigenare]

Ahem.

"The slippery slope fallacy assumes without evidence that if we take a particular step which in itself doesn’t cause a problem, it is nevertheless the first in a series of steps that will lead inevitably to some undesired outcome."


Except that we've got decades of evidence that the government, commercial businesses and other organisations are collecting more and more of our personal data.

Slippery Slope - Non-fallacious usage

What are you going to do if you're required to undergo vetting?

[northernladuk]

Let's hope BB isn't around when facial recognition becomes mainstream. He'll pop a blood vessel.

[WTFH]

Except that we've got decades of evidence that the government, commercial businesses and other organisations are collecting more and more of our personal data.

Slippery Slope - Non-fallacious usage

Evidence that someone is collecting personal data you provide them with is not evidence of a slippery slope.
It's evidence that they have asked you for data and they have collected it.

The evidence that it was a slippery slope would be that you could prove that a specific private sector organisation had changed their requirements several times for the information they wanted while providing no justification for that.

You've not done that yet.