Last week ministers began to take their first steps towards suspending the privacy rights of the nation’s citizens. With little fanfare the digital economy bill began hearings in parliament and while the proposed legislation contains some measures to be welcomed – such as creating a legal right to minimum internet download speeds – the big unwelcome change is that the public’s personal data will be shared across departments without specified safeguards. What vague measures have been outlined the information commissioner described as incoherent and inconsistent. If the bill becomes law, it will matter not if the data was collected for one reason and used for another. Government departments will be able to pool data collected without having put in place robust privacy protections. Such an approach invites public sector bodies to mimic the data free-for-all that currently exists in the private sector. We are already halfway there. Last week it emerged that details of individual children on the national pupil database in England and Wales were passed to the Home Office for immigration purposes hours after ministers said this was not happening.

The thinking is that for all the hand-wringing over the prospect of a too-powerful state limiting civil liberties, more lives are blighted by the erosion of authority than by its extension. So the government points to success in mapping troubled families and says data sharing helps work out “warm home” discounts for those in fuel poverty. Yet the bill is a symptom of a dangerously illiberal creed. There is an idea that data science will transform governance: that by harvesting and interrogating vast amounts of citizens’ personal data, policymakers can pinpoint solutions to society’s problems. It won’t. Instead big data politics will furnish an overweening state with arguments to justify ideological choices. Data science is often just information alchemy. Look at what happened when the data suggested that a single mother in York had been claiming benefits fraudulently because she had been cohabiting with Joseph Rowntree, the Quaker philanthropist who died in 1925. She lived in a property provided by the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust, now a housing association. With her welfare cut, she was forced to rely on a foodbank and told that she’d need to appeal. As Cardinal Richelieu realised long ago, “if you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him”.

In an age of deserving and undeserving citizens, judgments will have to made over the division of resources. But should virtue be ascribed by politicians who can build policies by deciding how much privacy the public is entitled to? What if local councils could decide to revoke a residential parking permit because they can access your driving record? Where’s the debate over Home Office plans to build up a picture of personal behaviour by running automated algorithms on bulk data sets – which could include passport records and police records? In this new battleground who is fighting for the interests of privacy in the democratic system? Since ministers have not spelt out data safeguards no one can give the public any answers.

What we are heading towards is Facebook government. Ministers have decided to change the default settings on public privacy controls so that individuals’ personal information would be shared, reflecting, they contest, a shift in society towards greater openness. They are beholden to the idea that by capturing citizens’ data they can reshape the state for the common good. In this world, voters are not consumers of public services, they are inputs. But personal data is the property of the citizen. It is not for government to decide whether it can be repurposed without informed consent – a lesson apparently unheeded despite the debacle over abandoned plans to share medical records. There is confusion over who can amass and manipulate data in the public and private sphere. Brexit complicates this, since we do not know whether the new EU data protection regime will be in place when the digital economy bill supposedly becomes law. Ministers say transparency and trust on public data will need to go hand in hand. This rings hollow. Whitehall does not even collect or analyse its performance in protecting information. Last month the National Audit Office pointed out 9,000 personal data breaches by departments. Ministers need to pause the bill and replace it with a better balance between the needs of government and the privacy of citizens.