I appreciate the point you make, but whatever the motive and intention of taking house to house records I think is completely besides the point. That such practice is undertaken by ordinary people, especially the times that a householder is absent, I find particularly quite worrying, and believe that the British public too would share this grave concern, regardless.
First, let me say that anything that helps to bring down the Borg is OK with me. But my concern here is that you could spend a lot of time publicizing an issue that really wouldn't grab too much public interest, versus putting your efforts into something that might get a real reaction, like the pedophile issue, or blood, or even the UN thing.
Second, I know most of the posts here seem to be written from a British perspective, and I'm not especially familiar with laws and procedures in the UK, so what I say might have a particularly American slant to it.
But I think that any court, whether a literal one or the court of public opinion, would tend to weigh the JW's practice of recording "not-homes" against the fact that we all breach our own security in many ways on a daily basis. For example, my wife and I just bought a TV and DVD player at Circuit City. Not being very technically-oriented, I jumped at the sales dude's offer to come over and hook it up for us after work one night. It was a fairly expensive HDTV unit, and I assumed that the commission he earned on it would compensate for his time. (We also offered to pay him for his trouble, but he wouldn't take anything) It occurred to us, however, that he could do this just to get into people's homes to case them for future burglaries, if he were that sort of person. So we knowingly breached our security in that sense by letting a stranger into our home. Again today, we did the same thing; the broiler in our gas range went, and we allowed a repairman to come into our home to fix it. We buy things constantly over the internet using credit cards. We use credit cards at stores and restaurants, too - leaving copies of our credit card information in the hands of poorly paid clerks.
Any one of these things that I mention above could come back to bite us on the butt, if the information fell into the wrong hands. But that's a big "if". All of us assume in our daily lives that information will be handled properly and used for the purpose for which it's gathered. If we are paranoid to the point of guarding against every possible abuse, we start to look like the Mel Gibson character in the movie, Conspiracy Theory. Most of us take reasonable precautions beforehand, and take action only after the fact, if some abuse does occur. And in the USA, at least, there are laws as to how much money a credit card holder is liable for under such circumstances.
Now, you could argue that in all of the above cases, I am initiating the transaction, where in the case of the JW's, they are approaching homes unbidden, then keeping "records" as to who is not home. But the question is, how do you prevent this, assuming it is the big problem you think it is? Would you make laws preventing strangers from calling at the homes of others without an invitation? If someone does call at the house of a stranger, would you prohibit them from writing a "note to self" reminding them of what happened when they got there? Or are you saying that all such private notes ought to be matters of public record? I think those things would be an unreasonable restriction of freedom, and would cause more problems than they solve. And, bear in mind what I have pointed out before, the "records" are not being accumulated; the sole purpose of noting who is not home is to be able to find the person home at a later time. Once that is accomplished, the note is discarded.
the kicker to this area is that, because of the policies of the WTS on child-abuse, such information, even if only temporarily kept, may well fall into the hands of a paedophile.
As might any other record kept in any other situation. The vast majority of Jehovah's Witnesses are not pedophiles. The fact that a small minority might be is not a reason to abridge the freedom of the majority. Again, I'm not defending the Borg or its policies here, and I am as opposed as anyone to the policies it has adopted with regard to pedophiles in the congregations. But if you're going to spend your time trying to arouse a public outcry, I think you'd get much more mileage attacking the pedophile issue directly, rather than this business about the house-to-house records.
In fact, many publishers do keep their own territory cards for extended periods of time, and the more zealous of these build up considerable knowledge of the territory and those who live in it. This information is often recorded and kept with the territory, and is not destroyed when the card is handed back.
Well, sure. The pioneers, for example, get to know every house in the territory after a while, but the only way to prevent that from happening would be to prohibit the door-to-door work entirely, and I don't think that's a good idea, because too many other freedoms would be affected. Even salesmen for worldly businesses get to know their territories thoroughly. If a few have criminal intent, then through the law, we need to deal with their criminal acts, not take away the freedoms of all those who may be in similar circumstances to prevent a small minority from abusing the situation.
In my years as a JW, records were never kept more than one cycle of the territory. Usually, territories were not returned until all householders had been contacted, or sometimes, a small number who had been missed might be noted on the House-to-House record for the next person to concentrate upon. But it never went beyond that. If those householders were still not contacted, the slip was discarded before the territory went out again. Even the carrying of the slip to the next assigned person as I have described was rare.
Anyway, do what you think is best, but I think there are bigger fish you could be frying than this one.
Tom
"The truth was obscure, too profound and too pure; to live it you had to explode." ---Bob Dylan
Hey! Now you are an outie, you can dance too!