GPs in England have been fussing, as doctors will, over confidentiality. For a government that strives to be modern, efficient and cost-effective, this is tiresome, to put it mildly. Ministers have come up with a can't-fail, couldn't-possibly-go-wrong scheme to transform the NHS and practitioners' working lives. For thanks, they are threatened with a boycott. Some nonsense to do with privacy, apparently.

The government isn't asking much. It wants merely to put the records of 50 million patients - stop me if this sounds familiar - on a single electronic database. What could be the harm in that? Yet the quacks are muttering about hackers, blackmailers, and sundry unauthorised officials helping themselves to information. As every sensible person knows, such things hardly ever happen.

The system, part of the very cost-effective £12.4 billion earmarked to modernise IT within the NHS, would be known - George Orwell being unavailable for comment - as "the Spine". Apparently calling it the Bladder would have given entirely the wrong impression. Yet of 1000 GPs contacted by Medix, the healthcare research organisation, three-quarters said the database would be informationally incontinent. They said it would leak. Copiously.

Some 59% of the doctors also said they would be unwilling to upload information without a patient's specific consent. You find that an unexceptional restatement of the basic relationship between doctor and patient? The government believes that you, along with the GPs, are being silly. In order to squeeze the maximum efficiency from the new database, it wants to upload records automatically unless, and only unless, there is a specific objection.

That probably seems logical to people who can think in binary: not saying no equals yes. It may even seem rational, too, to any government that defines consent as the absence of dissent. When you are in the information-mining business, such considerations matter.

Computers are logical, therefore a reliance on computers is logical. Computers rely on data, therefore those who rely on computers must procure data in order, at all costs, to safeguard reliability. Incomplete data - thanks to sceptics, privacy nuts, curmudgeons and anti-social elements - threatens other data. Ubiquity is, as it were, all. Universality is, so to speak, everything.

Besides, computers are so quick, so cheap, and such fun. You can burn a couple of discs for the National Audit Office and still find time for a couple of games of Solitaire. If the perfect logic of your computer, and the security of 25 million people, is thereafter compromised by cheap postal solutions, political mismanagement, and suspect human software, you can always review the situation later. Even for HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), it is important to ensure that the impossible doesn't happen twice.

That hints, though, at the first thing worth observing about the fiasco of the child benefit records: the more the blind appetite for information increases, the greater the scale of the inevitable catastrophe. Once upon a time, a couple of letters might get stuck down the back of a filing cabinet. Now, with gargantuan ambitions come gargantuan failures. Thus: 2111 "breaches in security" within HMRC during the last year alone. Thus: the Department of Work and Pensions posting out 26,000 letters, with 26,000 sets of bank details, to the wrong people. Thus: 41 laptops, containing who knows what, stolen from tax officials in the space of 12 months.

Reading a stolen disc - for which, handily, passwords are supplied as routine - is much better than grabbing a pile of non-sequential banknotes: there is no paper trail, no electronic trail, nothing. But that inspires a second thought about the latest (only the latest) debacle. When did we become saddled with the fantasy that computer-dependent systems are, or can be, secure, as in bank-vault secure?

Governments fall prey to dodgy software just like you and me, the difference being that their bugs cost billions. Governments have their security compromised, just like you and me, but we tend not to demand a say in 25 million lives.

Incompetence matters, but motives matter more. Clearly, if you are distributing public funds in the form of child benefit some information is essential. That does not explain why governments have taken to treating all information as essential. Nor does it explain why supposedly essential data is treated in such a cavalier, even contemptuous, fashion. "Terrorism", that increasingly threadbare excuse, is no answer. The official assumption that we have no worthwhile rights in the matter, and certainly no important say, is much more plausible.

They are entitled to demand. We are not, or not without a fight, entitled to refuse. Such is the basis from which the information obsession flows. It is mimicked, increasingly, in ways both fatuous and disturbing, by all manner of piddling organisations and enterprises who regard the surrender of intimate details on demand as no more than their due.

The point is that the people, high and low, who screwed up within HMRC clearly did not believe they were behaving in a way that was either idiotic or outrageous. Information, and the lives it represents, comes cheap. In such situations the politicians, equally, are mortified by crass inefficiency, not by what was once known as the principle of the thing. Grotesque carelessness with private information matters far less, in terms of public safety, than a desire to acquire unlimited quantities of information in the first place.

All last week, the government's critics were asking if ministers and their minions could be entrusted with our most intimate details. The proximate topic was HMRC, obviously, but the real issue was ID cards. Trusting souls assumed that the government would think again. Even hardened sceptics spoke as though the child benefit mess, at once simple and vast, was an IT debacle too far for an administration apparently hell-bent on inflicting computing disasters on every arm of government.

The technically-aware, meanwhile, reminded us that text burned to a disc is one thing, biometric records of your eyes, fingerprints and the like quite another. They are unique to individuals. If they are once put at risk there is no remedy. Yet these, supposedly, are to be the basis of ID cards and a system wider in scope than anything a democracy has dared to contemplate, at a vast cost to be borne by you, me, and the foreign-looking gentleman who just happens to have been born and raised in Britain.

In this, as in so many things, we don't trust the government and its agencies. That's healthy. Everyone has stories about the alarming, wholesale absence of simple competence. But these are the lesser evils. Would you feel better if they perfected their data harvesting?

The point about ID cards is not that they won't work (though they won't), nor that no-one in government can even agree what they might be for. The point is the sanctity of the person, the inviolability of identity, and liberty versus a bureaucrat's definition of greater good.

People worry, reasonably enough, about their carbon footprints. I'm more concerned these days about what I call my virtual footprint. Like most people, I hand over personal information almost daily. In return, I want a simple principle re-established: the information is mine to give, not theirs to take. The burden of proof has to be reversed. They have to tell me who wants to know, and why.

If not, and if they press on with ID cards - as they will - the agents of the state will have another criminal subversive on their hands. After last week, I don't think I'll be alone.