One of Dom’s villains left out, was data protection law. He claimed, “if someone somewhere in the system didn’t say, ‘ignore GDPR’ thousands of people were going to die,” and that “no one even knew if that itself was legal—it almost definitely wasn’t.”
Thousands of people have died since that event he recalled from March 2020, but as a result of Ministers’ decisions, not data laws.
Data protection laws are *not* barriers, but permissive laws to *enable* use of personal data within a set of standards and safeguards designed to protect people. The opposite of what its detractors would have us believe.
The starting point is fundamental human rights. Common law confidentially. But the GDPR and its related parts on public health, are in fact specifically designed to enable data processing that overrules those principles for pandemic response purposes . In recognition of emergency needs for a limited time period, data protection laws permit interference with our fundamental rights and freedoms, including overriding privacy.
We need that protection of our privacy sometimes from government itself. And sometimes from those who see themselves as “the good guys” and above the law.
The Department of Health appears to have no plan to tell people about care.data 2, the latest attempt at an NHS data grab, despite the fact that data protection laws require that they do. From September 1st (delayed to enable it to be done right, thanks to campaign efforts from medConfidential et supporters) all our GP medical records will be copied into a new national database for re-use, unless we actively opt out.
It’s groundhog day for the Department of Health. It is baffling why the government cannot understand or accept the need to do the right thing, and instead is repeating the same mistake of recent memory, all over again. Why the rush without due process and steamrollering any respect for the rule of law?
Were it not so serious, it might amuse me that some academic researchers appear to fail to acknowledge this matters, and they are getting irate on Twitter that *privacy* or ‘campaigners’ will prevent them getting hold of the data they appear to feel entitled to. Blame the people that designed a policy that will breach human rights and the law, not the people who want your rights upheld. And to blame the right itself is just, frankly, bizarre.
Such rants prompt me to recall the time when early on in my lay role on the Administrative Data Research Network approvals panel, a Director attending the meeting *as a guest* became so apoplectic with rage, that his face was nearly purple. He screamed, literally, at the panel of over ten well respected academics and experts in research and / or data because he believed the questions being asked over privacy and ethics principles in designing governance documents were unnecessary.
Or I might recall the request at my final meeting two years later in 2017 by another then Director, for access to highly sensitive and linked children’s health and education data to do (what I believed was valuable) public interest research involving the personal data of children with Down Syndrome. But the request came through the process with no ethical review. A necessary step before it should even have reached the panel for discussion.
I was left feeling from those two experiences, that both considered themselves and their work to be in effect “above the law” and expected special treatment, and a free pass without challenge. And that it had not improved over the two years.
If anyone in the research community cannot support due process, law, and human rights when it comes to admin data access, research using highly sensitive data about people’s lives with potential for significant community and personal impacts, then you are part of the problem. There was extensive public outreach in 2012-13 across the UK about the use of personal if de-identified data in safe settings. And in 2014 the same concerns and red-lines were raised by hundreds of people in person, almost universally with the same reactions at a range of care.data public engagement events. Feedback which institutions say matters, but continue to ignore.
We could also look back to when Michael Gove as Secretary of State for Education, changed the law in 2012 to permit pupil level, identifying and sensitive personal data to be given away to third parties. Journalists. Charities. Commercial companies, even included an online tutoring business, pre-pandemic and an agency making heat maps of school catchment areas from identifying pupil data for estate agents — notably, without any SEND pupils’ data. (Cummings was coincidentally a Gove SpAd at the Department for Education.) As a direct result of that decision to give away pupils’ personal data in 2012, (in effect ‘re-engineering’ how the education sector was structured and the roles of the local authority and non-state providers and creating a market for pupil data) an ICO audit of the DfE in February 2020 found unlawful practice and made 139 recommendations for change. We’re still waiting to see if and how it will be fixed. At the moment it’s business as usual. Literally. The ICO don’t appear even to have stopped further data distribution until made lawful.
In April 2021, in answer to a written Parliamentary Question Nick Gibb, Schools Minister, made a commitment to “publish an update to the audit in June 2021 and further details regarding the release mechanism of the full audit report will be contained in this update.” Will they promote openess, transparency, accountablity,or continue to skulk from publishing the whole truth?
Children have lost control of their digital footprint in state education by their fifth birthday. The majority of parents polled in 2018 do not know the National Pupil Database even exists. 69% of over 1,004 parents asked, replied that they had not been informed that the Department for Education may give away children’s data to third-parties at all.
Thousands of companies continue to exploit children’s school records, without opt-in or opt-out, including special educational needs, ethnicity, and other sensitive data at pupil level.
Data protection law alone is in fact so enabling of data flow, that it is inadequate to protect children’s rights and freedoms across the state education sector in England; whether from public interest, charity or commercial research interventions without opt in or out, without parental knowledge. We shouldn’t need to understand our rights or to be proactive, in order to have them protected by default but data protection law and the ICO in particular have been captured by the siren call of data as a source of ‘innovation’ and economic growth.
But suddenly, come 2020/21 he is suggesting he didn’t know the law that well after all, “no one even knew if that itself was legal—it almost definitely wasn’t.”
Data Protection law is being set up as a patsy, while our confidentiality is commodified. The problem is not the law. The problem is those in power who fail to respect it, those who believe themselves to be above it, and who feel an entitlement to exploit that for their own aims.
“Accordingly, Parliament passed the Data Protection Act 1984 and ratified the Convention in 1985, partly to ensure the free movement of data. The Data Protection Act 1984 contained principles which were taken almost directly from Convention 108 – including that personal data shall be obtained and processed fairly and lawfully and held only for specified purposes.”
“The Data Protection Directive (95/46/EC) (“the 1995 Directive”) provides the current basis for the UK’s data protection regime. The 1995 Directive stemmed from the European Commission’s concern that a number of Member States had not introduced national law related to Convention 108 which led to concern that barriers may be erected to data flows. In addition, there was a considerable divergence in the data protection laws between Member States. The focus of the 1995 Directive was to protect the right to privacy with respect to the processing of personal data and to ensure the free flow of personal data between Member States. “
It is a privilege to be a joint-recipient in the fourth year of the “Michal Serzycki” Data Protection Award, and I thank the Data Protection Authority in Poland (UODO) for the recognition of work for the benefit of promoting data protection values and the right to privacy.
I appreciate the award in particular as the founder of an NGO, and the indirect acknowledgement of the value of NGOs to be able to contribute to public policy, including openness towards international perspectives, standards, the importance of working together, and our role in holding the actions of state authorities and power to account, under the rule of law.
The award is shared with Mrs Barbara Gradkowska, Director of the Special School and Educational Center in Zamość, whose work in Poland has been central to the initiative, Your Data — Your Concern, an educational Poland-wide programme for schools that is supported and recognized by the UODO. It offers support to teachers in vocational training centres, primary, middle and high schools related to personal data protection and the right to privacy in education.
And it is also shared with Mr Maciej Gawronski, Polish legal advisor and authority in data protection, information technology, cloud computing, cybersecurity, intellectual property and business law.
In the rush to remote learning in 2020 in response to school closures in COVID-19, the UODO warmly received our collective international call for action, a letter in which over thirty organisations worldwide called on policy makers, data protection authorities and technology providers, to take action, and encouraged international collaboration to protect children around the world during the rapid adoption of digital educational technologies (“edTech”). The UODO issued statements and a guide on school IT security and data protection.
In September 2020, I worked with their Data Protection Office at a distance, in delivering a seminar for teachers, on remote education.
The award also acknowledges my part in the development of the Guidelines on Children’s Data Protection in an Education Setting adopted in November 2020, working in collaboration with country representatives at the Council of Europe Committee for Convention 108, as well as with observers, and the Committee’s incredible staff.
defenddigitalme is a call to action to protect children’s rights to privacy across the education sector in England, and beyond. Data protection has a role to play—within the broader rule of law— to protect and uphold the right to privacy, to prevent state interference in private and family life, and in the protection of the full range of human rights necessary in a democratic society. Fundamental human rights must be universally protected to foster human flourishing, to protect the personal dignity and freedoms of every individual, to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedoms.
The award was announced at the conference, “Real personal data protection in remote reality,” organized by the Personal Data Protection Office UODO, as part of the celebration of the 15th Data Protection Day on 28th January, 2021 with an award ceremony held on its eve in Warsaw.
‘People, ideas, machines — in that order.’ This quote in that latest blog by Dominic Cummings is spot on, but the blind spots or the deliberate scoping the blog reveals, are both just as interesting.
If you want to “figure out what characters around Putin might do”, move over Miranda. If your soul is for sale, then this might be the job for you. This isn’t anthropomorphism of Cummings, but an excuse to get in the parallels to Meryl Streep’s portrayal of Priestly.
“It will be exhausting but interesting and if you cut it you will be involved in things at the age of 21 that most people never see.”
Comments like these make people who are not of that mould, feel of less worth. Commitment comes in many forms. People with kids and caring responsibilities, may be some of your most loyal staff. You may not want them as your new PA, but you will almost certainly, not want to lose them across the board.
Some words would be wise in follow up to existing staff, the thousands of public servants we have today, after his latest post.
1. The blog is aimed at a certain kind of men. Speak to women too.
The framing of this call for staff is problematic, less for its suggested work ethic, than the structural inequalities it appears to purposely perpetuate. Despite the poke at public school bluffers. Do you want the best people around you, able to play well with others, or not?
I am disappointed that asking for “the sort of people we need to find” is designed, intentionally or not, to appeal to a certain kind of men. Even if he says it should be diverse and includes people, “like that girl hired by Bigend as a brand ‘diviner.'”
If Cummings is intentional about hiring the best people, then he needs to do by better by women. We already have a PM that many women would consider toxic to work around, and won’t as a result.
Some of the most brilliant, cognitively diverse, young people I know who fit these categories well, — and across the political spectrum–are themselves diverse by nature and expect their surroundings to be. They (unlike our generation), do not “babble about ‘gender identity diversity blah blah’.” Woke is not an adjective that needs explained, but a way of life. Put such people off by appearing to devalue their norms, and you’ll miss out on some potential brilliant applicants from the pool, which will already be self-selecting, excluding many who simply won’t work for you, or Boris, or Brexit blah blah. People prepared to burn out as you want them to, aren’t going to be at their best for long. And it takes a long time to recover.
‘That girl’ was the main character, and her name was Cayce Pollard. Women know why you should say her name. Fewer women will have worked at CERN, perhaps for related reasons, compared with “the ideal candidate” described in this call.
“If you want an example of the sort of people we need to find in Britain, look at this’he writes of C.C. Myers, with a link to, ‘On the Cover: The World’s Fastest Man.“
Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett, Alexander Grothendieck, Bret Victor, von Neumann, Cialdini. Groves, Mueller, Jain, Pearl, Kay, Gibson, Grove, Makridakis, Yudkowsky, Graham and Thiel.
The *men illustrated* list, goes on and on.
What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?
Not something I care to discuss over dinner either.
But women of all ages do care that our PM appears to be a cad. It matters therefore that your people be seen to work to a better standard. You want people loyal to your cause, and the public to approve, even if they don’t of your leader. Leadership goes far beyond electoral numbers and a mandate.
A different kind of the same kind of thing, isn’t real change. This call for something new, is far less radical than it is being portrayed as.
2. Change. Don’t forget to manage it by design.
In fact, the speculation that this is all change, hiring new people for new stuff [some of which elsewhere he has genuinely interesting ideas on, like, “decentralisation and distributed control to minimise the inevitable failures of even the best people”] doesn’t really feature here, rather it is something of a precursor. He’s starting less with building the new, and rather with let’s ‘drain the swamp’ of bureaucracy. The Washington-style of 1980’s Reagan, including, ‘let’s put in some more of our kind of people’.
His personal brand of longer-term change may not be what some of his cheerleaders think it will be, but if the outcome is the same and seen to be ‘showing these Swamp creatures the zero mercy they deserve‘, [sic] does intent matter? It does, and he needs to describe his future plans better, if he wants to have a civil service that works well.
The biggest content gap (leaving actual policy content aside) is any appreciation of the current, and need for change management.
Training gets a mention; but new process success, depends on effectively communicating on change, and delivering training about it to all, not only those from whom you expect the most high performance. People not projects, remember?
Change management and capability transfer delivered by costly consultants, is not needed, but making it understandable not elitist, is.
genuinely present an understanding of the as-is, (I get you and your org, for change *with* you, not to force change upon you)
communicating what the future model is going to move towards (this is why you want to change and what good looks like), and
a roadmap of how you expect the organisation to get there (how and when), that need not be constricted by artificial comms grids.
On top of the organisational model, *every* member of staff must know where their own path fits in, and if their role is under threat, whether training will be offered to adapt, or whether they will be made redundant. Uncertainty around this over time, is also toxic. You might not care if you lose people along the way. You might consider these the most expendable people. But if people are fearful and unhappy in your organisation, or about their own future, it will hold them back from delivering at their best, and the organisation as a result. And your best will leave, as much as those who are not.
“How to build great teams and so on”, is not a bolt-on extra here, it is fundamental. You can’t forget the kitchens. But changing the infrastructure alone, cannot deliver real change you want to see.
3. Communications. Neither propaganda and persuasion nor PR.
There is not such a vast difference between the business of communications as a campaign tool, and tool for control. Persuasion and propaganda. But where there may be a blind spot in the promotion of the Cialdini-six style comms, is that behavioural scientists that excel at these, will not use the kind of communication tools that either the civil service nor the country needs for the serious communications of change, beyond the immediate short term.
As an aside, for anyone having kittens about using an unofficial email to get around FOI requests and think it a conspiracy to hide internal communications, it really doesn’t work that way. Don’t panic, we know where our towel is.
4. The Devil craves DARPA. Build it with safe infrastructures.
Cumming’s long-established fetishing of technology and fascination with Moscow will be familiar to those close, or blog readers. They are also currently fashionable, again. The solution is therefore no surprise, and has been prepped in various blogs for ages. The language is familiar. But single-mindedness over this length of time, can make for short sightedness.
“The limiting factor for the Pentagon in deploying advanced technology to conflict in a useful time period was not new technical ideas — overcoming its own bureaucracy was harder than overcoming enemy action.”
Almost a year after that project collapsed, its most interesting feature was surely not the role of bureaucracy among tech failure. Maven was a failure not of tech, nor bureaucracy, but to align its values with the decency of its workforce. Whether the recallibration of its compass as a company is even possible, remains to be seen.
If firing staff who hold you to account against a mantra of ‘don’t be evil’ is championed, this drive for big tech values underpinning your staff thinking and action, will be less about supporting technology moonshots, than a shift to the Dark Side of capitalist surveillance.
The incessant narrative focus on man and the machine –machine learning, —the machinery of government, quantitative models and the frontiers of the science of prediction is an obsession with power. The downplay of the human in that world —is displayed in so many ways, but the most obvious is the press and political narrative of a need to devalue human rights, — and yet to succeed, tech and innovation needs an equal and equivalent counterweight, in accountability under human rights and the law, so that when systems fail people, they do not cause catastrophic harm at scale.
We must stop state systems failing children, if they are not to create a failed society.
A UK DARPA-esque, devolved hothousing for technology will fail, if you don’t shore up public trust. Both in the state and commercial sectors. An electoral mandate won’t last, nor reach beyond its scope for long. You need a social licence to have legitimacy for tech that uses public data, that is missing today. It is bone-headed and idiotic that we can’t get this right as a country. Despite knowing how to, if government keeps avoiding doing it safely, it will come at a cost.
You might of course, not care. But commercial companies will when they go under. The electorate will. Your masters might if their legacy will suffer and debate about the national good and the UK as a Life Sciences centre, all come to naught.
There was little in this blog, of the reality of what these hires should deliver beyond more tech and systems’ change. But the point is to make systems that work for people, not see more systems at work.
5. The ‘circle of competence’ needs values, not only to value skills.
It’s important and consistent behaviour that Cummings says he recognises his own weaknesses, that some decisions are beyond his ‘circle of competence’ and that he should in in effect become redundant, having brought in, “the sort of expertise supporting the PM and ministers that is needed.” Founder’s syndrome is common to organisations and politics is not exempt. But neither is the Peter principle a phenomenon particular to only the civil service.
“One of the problems with the civil service is the way in which people are shuffled such that they either do not acquire expertise or they are moved out of areas they really know to do something else.”
But so what? what’s worse, is politics has not only the Peter’s but the Dilbert principle when it comes to senior leadership. You can’t put people in positions expected to command respect when they tell others to shut up and go away. Or fire without due process. If you want orgs to function together at scale, especially beyond the current problems with silos, they need people on the ground who can work together, and have a common goal who respect those above them, and feel it is all worthwhile. Their politics don’t matter. But integrity, respect and trust do, even if they don’t matter to you personally.
I agree wholeheartedly that circles of competence matter [as I see the need to build some in education on data and edTech]. Without the appropriate infrastructure change, radical change of policy is nearly impossible. But skill is not the only competency that counts when it comes to people.
If the change you want is misaligned with people’s values, people won’t support it, no matter who you get to see it through. Something on the integrity that underpins this endeavour, will matter to the applicants too. Most people do care how managers treat their own.
The blog was pretty clear that Cummings won’t value staff, unless their work ethic, skills and acceptance will belong to him alone to judge sufficient or not, to be “binned within weeks if you don’t fit.”
This government already knows it has treated parts of the public like that for too long. Policy has knowingly left some people behind on society’s scrap heap, often those scored by automated systems as inadequate. Families in-work moved onto Universal Credit, feed their children from food banks for #5WeeksTooLong. The rape clause. Troubled families. Children with special educational needs battling for EHC plan recognition without which schools won’t take them, and DfE knowingly underfunding suitable Alternative Provision in education by a colossal several hundred per cent amount per place, by design.
The ‘circle of competence’ needs to recognise what happens as a result of policy, not only to place value on the skills in its delivery or see outcomes on people as inevitable or based on merit. Charlie Munger may have said, “At the end of the day – if you live long enough – most people get what they deserve.”
An awful lot of people deserve a better standard of living and human dignity than the UK affords them today. And we can’t afford not to fix it. A question for new hires: How will you contribute to doing this?
6. Remember that our civil servants, are after all, public servants.
The real test of competence, and whether the civil service delivers for the people whom they serve, is inextricably bound with government policy. If its values, if its ethics are misguided, building a new path with or without new people, will be impossible.
The best civil servants I have worked with, have one thing in common. They have a genuine desire to make the world better. [We can disagree on what that looks like and for whom, on fraud detection, on immigration, on education, on exploitation of data mining and human rights, or the implications of the law. Their policy may bring harm, but their motivation is not malicious.] Your goal may be a ‘better’ civil service. They may be more focussed on better outcomes for people, not systems. Lose sight of that, and you put the service underpinning government, at risk. Not to bring change for good, but to destroy the very point of it. Keep the point of a better service, focussed on the improvement for the public.
Civil servants civilly serve in the words of Stefan Czerniawski. These plans will need challenge to be the best they can be. As pubstrat asked, so should we all ask Cummings to outline his thoughts on:
“What makes the decisions which civil servants implement legitimate?
Where are the boundaries of that legitimacy and how can they be detected?
What should civil servants do if those boundaries are reached and crossed?”
Self-destruction for its own sake, is not a compelling narrative for change, whether you say you want to control that narrative, or not.
Two hands are a lot, but many more already work in the civil service. If Cummings only works against them, he’ll succeed not in building change, but resistance.
“Whatever the social issue we want to grasp – the answer should always begin with family.”
Not my words, but David Cameron’s. Just five years ago, Conservative policy was all about “putting families at the centre of domestic policy-making.”
Debate on the Online Harms White Paper, thanks in part to media framing of its own departmental making, is almost all about children. But I struggle with the debate that leaves out our role as parents almost entirely, other than as bereft or helpless victims ourselves.
I am conscious wearing my other hat of defenddigitalme, that not all families are the same, and not all children have families. Yet it seems counter to conservative values, for a party that places the family traditionally at the centre of policy, to leave out or abdicate parents of responsibility for their children’s actions and care online.
Parental responsibility cannot be outsourced to tech companies, or accept it’s too hard to police our children’s phones. If we as parents are concerned about harms, it is our responsibility to enable access to that which is not, and be aware and educate ourselves and our children on what is. We are aware of what they read in books. I cast an eye over what they borrow or buy. I play a supervisory role.
Brutal as it may be, the Internet is not responsible for suicide. It’s just not that simple. We cannot bring children back from the dead. We certainly can as society and policy makers, try and create the conditions that harms are not normalised, and do not become more common. And seek to reduce risk. But few would suggest social media is a single source of children’s mental health issues.
What policy makers are trying to regulate is in essence, not a single source of online harms but 2.1 billion users’ online behaviours.
It follows that to see social media as a single source of attributable fault per se, is equally misplaced. A one-size-fits-all solution is going to be flawed, but everyone seems to have accepted its inevitability.
So how will we make the least bad law?
If we are to have sound law that can be applied around what is lawful, we must reduce the substance of debate by removing what is alreadyunlawful and has appropriate remedy and enforcement.
Debate must also try to be free from emotive content and language.
I strongly suspect the language around ‘our way of life’ and ‘values’ in the White Paper comes from the Home Office. So while it sounds fair and just, we must remember reality in the background of TOEIC, of Windrush, of children removed from school because their national records are being misused beyond educational purposes. The Home Office is no friend of child rights, and does not foster the societal values that break down discrimination and harm. It instead creates harms of its own making, and division by design.
I’m going to quote Graham Smith, for I cannot word it better.
“Harms to society, feature heavily in the White Paper, for example: content or activity that:
“threatens our way of life in the UK, either by undermining national security, or by reducing trust and undermining our shared rights, responsibilities and opportunities to foster integration.”
Similarly:
“undermine our democratic values and debate”;
“encouraging us to make decisions that could damage our health, undermining our respect and tolerance for each other and confusing our understanding of what is happening in the wider world.”
This kind of prose may befit the soapbox or an election manifesto, but has no place in or near legislation.”
My key concern in this area is that through a feeling of ‘it is all awful’ stems the sense that ‘all regulation will be better than now’, and comes with a real risk of increasing current practices that would not be better than now, and in fact need fixing.
More monitoring
The first, is today’s general monitoring of school children’s Internet content for risk and harms, which creates unintended consequences and very real harms of its own — at the moment, without oversight.
“This is the practicality of monitoring the internet. When the duty of care required by the White Paper becomes law, companies and regulators will have to do a lot more of it. ” [April 30, HOL]
The Brennan Centre yesterday published its research on the spend by US schools purchasing social media monitoring software from 2013-18, and highlighted some of the issues:
“Aside from anecdotes promoted by the companies that sell this software, there is no proof that these surveillance tools work [compared with other practices]. But there are plenty of risks. In any context, social media is ripe for misinterpretation and misuse.” [Brennan Centre for Justice, April 30, 209]
That monitoring software focuses on two things —
a) seeing children through the lens of terrorism and extremism, and b) harms caused by them to others, or as victims of harms by others, or self-harm.
It is the near same list of ‘harms’ topics that the White Paper covers. Co-driven by the same department interested in it in schools — the Home Office.
These concerns are set in the context of the direction of travel of law and policy making, its own loosening of accountability and process.
It was preceded by a House of Commons discussion on Social Media and Health, lead by the former Minister for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport who seems to feel more at home in that sphere, than in health.
His unilateral award of funds to the Samaritans for work with Google and Facebook on a duty of care, while the very same is still under public consultation, is surprising to say the least.
But it was his response to this question, which points to the slippery slope such regulations may lead. The Freedom of Speech champions should be most concerned not even by what is potentially in any legislation ahead, but in the direction of travel and debate around it.
“Will he look at whether tech giants such as Amazon can be brought into the remit of the Online Harms White Paper? ”
He replied, that “Amazon sells physical goods for the most part and surely has a duty of care to those who buy them, in the same way that a shop has a responsibility for what it sells. My hon. Friend makes an important point, which I will follow up.”
Debate so far has demonstrated broad gaps between what is wanted, in knowledge, and what is possible. If behaviours are to be stopped because they are undesirable rather than unlawful, we open up a whole can of worms if not done with the greatest attention to detail.
Lord Stevenson and Lord McNally both suggested that pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill, and more discussion would be positive. Let’s hope it happens.
Here’s my personal first reflections on the Online Harms White Paper discussion so far.
Six suggestions:
Suggestion one:
The Law Commission Review, mentioned in the House of Lords debate, may provide what I have been thinking of crowd sourcing and now may not need to. A list of laws that the Online Harms White Paper related discussion reaches into, so that we can compare what is needed in debate versus what is being sucked in. We should aim to curtail emotive discussion of broad risk and threat that people experience online. This would enable the themes which are already covered in law to be avoided, and focus on the gaps. It would make for much tighter and more effective legislation. For example, the Crown Prosecution Service offers Guidelines on prosecuting cases involving communications sent via social media, but a wider list of law is needed.
Suggestion two: After (1) defining what legislation is lacking, definitions must be very clear, narrow, and consistent across other legislation. Not for the regulator to determine ad-hoc and alone.
Suggestion three: If children’s rights are at to be so central in discussion on this paper, then their wider rights must including privacy and participation, access to information and freedom of speech must be included in debate. This should include academic research-based evidence of children’s experience online when making the regulations.
Suggestion four: Internet surveillance software in schools should be publicly scrutinised. A review should establish the efficacy, boundaries and oversight of policy and practice regards Internet monitoring for harms and not embed even more, without it. Boundaries should be put into legislation for clarity and consistency.
Suggestion five: Terrorist activity or child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) online are already unlawful and should not need additional Home Office powers. Great caution must be exercised here.
Suggestion six: Legislation could and should encapsulate accountability and oversight for micro-targeting and algorithmic abuse.
More detail behind my thinking, follows below, after the break. [Structure rearranged on May 14, 2019]
“A new, a vast, and a powerful language is developed for the future use of analysis, in which to wield its truths so that these may become of more speedy and accurate practical application for the purposes of mankind than the means hitherto in our possession have rendered possible.” [on Ada Lovelace, The First tech Visionary, New Yorker, 2013]
What would Ada Lovelace have argued for in today’s AI debates? I think she may have used her voice not only to call for the good use of data analysis, but for her second strength.The power of her imagination.
James Ball recently wrote in The European [1]:
“It is becoming increasingly clear that the modern political war isn’t one against poverty, or against crime, or drugs, or even the tech giants – our modern political era is dominated by a war against reality.”
My overriding take away from three days spent at the Conservative Party Conference this week, was similar. It reaffirmed the title of a school debate I lost at age 15, ‘We only believe what we want to believe.’
James writes that it is, “easy to deny something that’s a few years in the future“, and that Conservatives, “especially pro-Brexit Conservatives – are sticking to that tried-and-tested formula: denying the facts, telling a story of the world as you’d like it to be, and waiting for the votes and applause to roll in.”
These positions are not confined to one party’s politics, or speeches of future hopes, but define perception of current reality.
I spent a lot of time listening to MPs. To Ministers, to Councillors, and to party members. At fringe events, in coffee queues, on the exhibition floor. I had conversations pressed against corridor walls as small press-illuminated swarms of people passed by with Queen Johnson or Rees-Mogg at their centre.
In one panel I heard a primary school teacher deny that child poverty really exists, or affects learning in the classroom.
In another, in passing, a digital Minister suggested that Pupil Referral Units (PRU) are where most of society’s ills start, but as a Birmingham head wrote this week, “They’ll blame the housing crisis on PRUs soon!” and “for the record, there aren’t gang recruiters outside our gates.”
This is no tirade on failings of public policymakers however. While it is easy to suspect malicious intent when you are at, or feel, the sharp end of policies which do harm, success is subjective.
It is clear that an overwhelming sense of self-belief exists in those responsible, in the intent of any given policy to do good.
Where policies include technology, this is underpinned by a self re-affirming belief in its power. Power waiting to be harnessed by government and the public sector. Even more appealing where it is sold as a cost-saving tool in cash strapped councils. Many that have cut away human staff are now trying to use machine power to make decisions. Some of the unintended consequences of taking humans out of the process, are catastrophic for human rights.
The disconnect between perception of risk, the reality of risk, and real harm, whether perceived or felt from these applied policies in real-life, is not so much, ‘easy to deny something that’s a few years in the future‘ as Ball writes, but a denial of the reality now.
Concerningly, there is lack of imagination of what real harms look like.There is no discussion where sometimes these predictive policies have no positive, or even a negative effect, and make things worse.
I’m deeply concerned that there is an unwillingness to recognise any failures in current data processing in the public sector, particularly at scale, and where it regards the well-known poor quality of administrative data. Or to be accountable for its failures.
Harms, existing harms to individuals, are perceived as outliers. Any broad sweep of harms across policy like Universal Credit, seem perceived as political criticism, which makes the measurable failures less meaningful, less real, and less necessary to change.
There is a worrying growing trend of finger-pointing exclusively at others’ tech failures instead. In particular, social media companies.
Imagination and mistaken ideas are reinforced where the idea is plausible, and shared. An oft heard and self-affirming belief was repeated in many fora between policymakers, media, NGOs regards children’s online safety. “There is no regulation online”. In fact, much that applies offline applies online. The Crown Prosecution Service Social Media Guidelines is a good place to start. [2] But no one discusses where children’s lives may be put at risk or less safe, through the use of state information about them.
Policymakers want data to give us certainty. But many uses of big data, and new tools appear to do little more than quantify moral fears, and yet still guide real-life interventions in real-lives.
Child abuse prediction, and school exclusion interventions should not be test-beds for technology the public cannot scrutinise or understand.
In one trial attempting to predict exclusion, this recent UK research project in 2013-16 linked children’s school records of 800 children in 40 London schools, with Metropolitan Police arrest records of all the participants. It found interventions created no benefit, and may have caused harm. [3]
“Anecdotal evidence from the EiE-L core workers indicated that in some instances schools informed students that they were enrolled on the intervention because they were the “worst kids”.”
“Keeping students in education, by providing them with an inclusive school environment, which would facilitate school bonds in the context of supportive student–teacher relationships, should be seen as a key goal for educators and policy makers in this area,” researchers suggested.
But policy makers seem intent to use systems that tick boxes, and create triggers to single people out, with quantifiable impact.
Some of these systems are known to be poor, or harmful.
When it comes to predicting and preventing child abuse, there is concern with the harms in US programmes ahead of us, such as both Pittsburgh, and Chicago that has scrapped its programme.
The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services ended a high-profile program that used computer data mining to identify children at risk for serious injury or death after the agency’s top official called the technology unreliable, and children still died.
“We are not doing the predictive analytics because it didn’t seem to be predicting much,” DCFS Director Beverly “B.J.” Walker told the Tribune.
Many professionals in the UK share these concerns. How long will they be ignored and children be guinea pigs without transparent error rates, or recognition of the potential harmful effects?
Why on earth not? At least for these high risk projects.
How long should children be the test subjects of machine learning tools at scale, without transparent error rates, audit, or scrutiny of their systems and understanding of unintended consequences?
Is harm to any child a price you’re willing to pay to keep using these systems to perhaps identify others, while we don’t know?
Is there an acceptable positive versus negative outcome rate?
The evidence so far of AI in child abuse prediction is not clearly showing that more children are helped than harmed.
Surely it’s time to stop thinking, and demand action on this.
It doesn’t take much imagination, to see the harms. Safe technology, and safe use of data, does not prevent the imagination or innovation, employed for good.
Where you are willing to sacrifice certainty of human safety for the machine decision, I want someone to be accountable for why.
References
[1] James Ball, The European, Those waging war against reality are doomed to failure, October 4, 2018.
[2] Thanks to Graham Smith for the link. “Social Media – Guidelines on prosecuting cases involving communications sent via social media. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) , August 2018.”
[3] Obsuth, I., Sutherland, A., Cope, A. et al. J Youth Adolescence (2017) 46: 538. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-016-0468-4 London Education and Inclusion Project (LEIP): Results from a Cluster-Randomized Controlled Trial of an Intervention to Reduce School Exclusion and Antisocial Behavior (March 2016)
What is means to be human is going to be different. That was the last word of a panel of four excellent speakers, and the sparkling wit and charm of chair Timandra Harkness, at tonight’s Turing Institute event, hosted at the British Library, on the future of data.
The first speaker, Bernie Hogan, of the Oxford Internet Institute, spoke of Facebook’s emotion experiment, and the challenges of commercial companies ownership and concentrations of knowledge, as well as their decisions controlling what content you get to see.
He also explained simply what an API is in human terms. Like a plug in a socket and instead of electricity, you get a flow of data, but the data controller can control which data can come out of the socket.
And he brilliantly brought in a thought what would it mean to be able to go back in time to the Nuremberg trials, and regulate not only medical ethics, but the data ethics of indirect and computational use of information. How would it affect today’s thinking on AI and machine learning and where we are now?
“Available does not mean accessible, transparent does not mean accountable”
Charles from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, who had also worked for Trinity Mirror using data analytics, introduced some of the issues that large datasets have for the public.
People rarely have the means to do any analytics well.
Even if open data are available, they are not necessarily accessible due to the volume of data to access, and constraints of common software (such as excel) and time constraints.
Without the facts they cannot go see a [parliamentary] representative or community group to try and solve the problem.
Local journalists often have targets for the number of stories they need to write, and target number of Internet views/hits to meet.
Putting data out there is only transparency, but not accountability if we cannot turn information into knowledge that can benefit the public.
“Trust, is like personal privacy. Once lost, it is very hard to restore.”
Jonathan Bamford, Head of Parliamentary and Government Affairs at the ICO, took us back to why we need to control data at all. Democracy. Fairness. The balance of people’s rights, like privacy, and Freedom-of-Information, and the power of data holders. The awareness that power of authorities and companies will affect the lives of ordinary citizens. And he said that even early on there was a feeling there was a need to regulate who knows what about us.
The third generation of Data Protection law he said, is now more important than ever to manage the whole new era of technology and use of data that did not exist when previous laws were made.
But, he said, the principles stand true today. Don’t be unfair. Use data for the purposes people expect. Security of data matters. As do rights to see the data people hold about us. Make sure data are relevant, accurate, necessary and kept for a sensible amount of time.
And even if we think that technology is changing, he argued, the principles will stand, and organisations need to consider these principles before they do things, considering privacy as a fundamental human right by default, and data protection by design.
After all, we should remember the Information Commissioner herself recently said,
“privacy does not have to be the price we pay for innovation. The two can sit side by side. They must sit side by side.
It’s not always an easy partnership and, like most relationships, a lot of energy and effort is needed to make it work. But that’s what the law requires and it’s what the public expects.”
“We must not forget, evil people want to do bad things. AI needs to be audited.”
Joanna J. Bryson was brilliant her multifaceted talk, summing up how data will affect our lives. She explained how implicit biases work, and how we reason, make decisions and showed up how we think in some ways in Internet searches. She showed in practical ways, how machine learning is shaping our future in ways we cannot see. And she said, firms asserting that doing these things fairly and openly and that regulation no longer fits new tech, “is just hoo-hah”.
She talked about the exciting possibilities and good use of data, but that , “we must not forget, evil people want to do bad things. AI needs to be audited.” She summed up, we will use data to predict ourselves. And she said:
“What is means to be human is going to be different.”
That is perhaps the crux of this debate. How do data and machine learning and its mining of massive datasets, and uses for ‘prediction’, affect us as individual human beings, and our humanity?
The last audience question addressed inequality. Solutions like transparency, subject access, accountability, and understanding biases and how we are used, will never be accessible to all. It needs a far greater digital understanding across all levels of society. How can society both benefit from and be involved in the future of data in public life? The conclusion was made, that we need more faith in public institutions working for people at scale.
But what happens when those institutions let people down, at scale?
The debate was less about the Future of Data in Public Life, and much more about how big data affects our personal lives. Most of the discussion was around how we understand the use of our personal information by companies and institutions, and how will we ensure democracy, fairness and equality in future.
The question went unanswered from an audience member, how do we protect ourselves from the harms we cannot see, or protect the most vulnerable who are least able to protect themselves?
“How can we future proof data protection legislation and make sure it keeps up with innovation?”
That audience question is timely given the new Data Protection Bill. But what legislation means in practice, I am learning rapidly, can be very different from what is in the written down in law.
One additional tool in data privacy and rights legislation is up for discussion, right now, in the UK. If it matters to you, take action.
NGOs could be enabled to make complaints on behalf of the public under article 80 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). However, the government has excluded that right from the draft UK Data Protection Bill launched last week.
“Paragraph 53 omits from Article 80, representation of data subjects, where provided for by Member State law” from paragraph 1 and paragraph 2,” [Data Protection Bill Explanatory notes, paragraph 681 p84/112]. 80 (2) gives members states the option to provide for NGOs to take action independently on behalf of many people that may have been affected.
If you want that right, a right others will be getting in other countries in the EU, then take action. Call your MP or write to them. Ask for Article 80, the right to representation, in UK law. We need to ensure that our human rights continue to be enacted and enforceable to the maximum, if, “what is means to be human is going to be different.”
For the Future of Data, has never been more personal.
What would it mean for you to trust an Internet connected product or service and why would you not?
What has damaged consumer trust in products and services and why do sellers care?
What do we want to see different from today, and what is necessary to bring about that change?
These three pairs of questions implicitly underpinned the intense day of #iotmark discussion at the London Zoo last Friday.
The questions went unasked, and could have been voiced before we started, although were probably assumed to be self-evident:
Why do you want one at all [define the problem]?
What needs to change and why [define the future model]?
How do you deliver that and for whom [set out the solution]?
If a group does not agree on the need and drivers for change, there will be no consensus on what that should look like, what the gap is to achieve it, and even less on making it happen.
So who do you want the trustmark to be for, why will anyone want it, and what will need to change to deliver the aims? No one wants a trustmark per se. Perhaps you want what values or promises it embodies to demonstrate what you stand for, promote good practice, and generate consumer trust. To generate trust, you must be seen to be trustworthy. Will the principles deliver on those goals?
The Open IoT Certification Mark Principles, as a rough draft was the outcome of the day, and are available online.
Here’s my reflections, including what was missing on privacy, and the potential for it to be considered in future.
I’ve structured this first, assuming readers attended the event, at ca 1,000 words. Lists and bullet points. The background comes after that, for anyone interested to read a longer piece.
Many thanks upfront, to fellow participants, to the organisers Alexandra D-S and Usman Haque and the colleague who hosted at the London Zoo. And Usman’s Mum. I hope there will be more constructive work to follow, and that there is space for civil society to play a supporting role and critical friend.
The mark didn’t aim to fix the IoT in a day, but deliver something better for product and service users, by those IoT companies and providers who want to sign up. Here is what I took away.
I learned three things
A sense of privacy is not homogenous, even within people who like and care about privacy in theoretical and applied ways. (I very much look forward to reading suggestions promised by fellow participants, even if enforced personal openness and ‘watching the watchers’ may mean ‘privacy is theft‘.)
Awareness of current data protection regulations needs improved in the field. For example, Subject Access Requests already apply to all data controllers, public and private. Few have read the GDPR, or the e-Privacy directive, despite importance for security measures in personal devices, relevant for IoT.
I truly love working on this stuff, with people who care.
And it reaffirmed things I already knew
Change is hard, no matter in what field.
People working together towards a common goal is brilliant.
Group collaboration can create some brilliantly sharp ideas. Group compromise can blunt them.
Some men are particularly bad at talking over each other, never mind over the women in the conversation. Women notice more. (Note to self: When discussion is passionate, it’s hard to hold back in my own enthusiasm and not do the same myself. To fix.)
The IoT context, and risks within it are not homogenous, but brings new risks and adverseries. The risks for manufacturers and consumers and the rest of the public are different, and cannot be easily solved with a one-size-fits-all solution. But we can try.
Concerns I came away with
If the citizen / customer / individual is to benefit from the IoT trustmark, they must be put first, ahead of companies’ wants.
If the IoT group controls both the design, assessment to adherence and the definition of success, how objective will it be?
The group was not sufficiently diverse and as a result, reflects too little on the risks and impact of the lack of diversity in design and effect, and the implications of dataveillance .
Critical minority thoughts although welcomed, were stripped out from crowdsourced first draft principles in compromise.
More future thinking should be built-in to be robust over time.
What was missing
There was too little discussion of privacy in perhaps the most important context of IoT – inter connectivity and new adversaries. It’s not only about *your* thing, but things that it speaks to, interacts with, of friends, passersby, the cityscape , and other individual and state actors interested in offense and defense. While we started to discuss it, we did not have the opportunity to discuss sufficiently at depth to be able to get any thinking into applying solutions in the principles.
One of the greatest risks that users face is the ubiquitous collection and storage of data about users that reveal detailed, inter-connected patterns of behaviour and our identity and not seeing how that is used by companies behind the scenes.
What we also missed discussing is not what we see as necessary today, but what we can foresee as necessary for the short term future, brainstorming and crowdsourcing horizon scanning for market needs and changing stakeholder wants.
Future thinking
Here’s the areas of future thinking that smart thinking on the IoT mark could consider.
We are moving towards ever greater requirements to declare identity to use a product or service, to register and log in to use anything at all. How will that change trust in IoT devices?
Single identity sign-on is becoming ever more imposed, and any attempts for multiple presentation of who I am by choice, and dependent on context, therefore restricted. [not all users want to use the same social media credentials for online shopping, with their child’s school app, and their weekend entertainment]
Is this imposition what the public wants or what companies sell us as what customers want in the name of convenience? What I believe the public would really want is the choice to do neither.
There is increasingly no private space or time, at places of work.
Limitations on private space are encroaching in secret in all public city spaces. How will ‘handoffs’ affect privacy in the IoT?
There is too little understanding of the social effects of this connectedness and knowledge created, embedded in design.
What effects may there be on the perception of the IoT as a whole, if predictive data analysis and complex machine learning and AI hidden in black boxes becomes more commonplace and not every company wants to be or can be open-by-design?
Ubiquitous collection and storage of data about users that reveal detailed, inter-connected patterns of behaviour and our identity needs greater commitments to disclosure. Where the hand-offs are to other devices, and whatever else is in the surrounding ecosystem, who has responsibility for communicating interaction through privacy notices, or defining legitimate interests, where the data joined up may be much more revealing than stand-alone data in each silo?
Define with greater clarity the privacy threat models for different groups of stakeholders and address the principles for each.
What would better look like?
The draft privacy principles are a start, but they’re not yet aspirational as I would have hoped. Of course the principles will only be adopted if possible, practical and by those who choose to. But where is the differentiator from what everyone is required to do, and better than the bare minimum? How will you sell this to consumers as new? How would you like your child to be treated?
The wording in these 5 bullet points, is the first crowdsourced starting point.
The supplier of this product or service MUST be General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant.
This product SHALL NOT disclose data to third parties without my knowledge.
I SHOULD get full access to all the data collected about me.
I MAY operate this device without connecting to the internet.
My data SHALL NOT be used for profiling, marketing or advertising without transparent disclosure.
Yes other points that came under security address some of the crossover between privacy and surveillance risks, but there is as yet little substantial that is aspirational to make the IoT mark a real differentiator in terms of privacy. An opportunity remains.
It was that and how young people perceive privacy that I hoped to bring to the table. Because if manufacturers are serious about future success, they cannot ignore today’s children and how they feel. How you treat them today, will shape future purchasers and their purchasing, and there is evidence you are getting it wrong.
The timing is good in that it now also offers the opportunity to promote consistent understanding, and embed the language of GDPR and ePrivacy regulations into consistent and compatible language in policy and practice in the #IoTmark principles.
User rights I would like to see considered
These are some of the points I would think privacy by design would mean. This would better articulate GDPR Article 25 to consumers.
Data sovereignty is a good concept and I believe should be considered for inclusion in explanatory blurb before any agreed privacy principles.
Goods should by ‘dumb* by default’ until the smart functionality is switched on. [*As our group chair/scribe called it] I would describe this as, “off is the default setting out-of-the-box”.
Privact by design. Deniability by default. i.e. not only after opt out, but a company should not access the personal or identifying purchase data of anyone who opts out of data collection about their product/service use during the set up process.
The right to opt out of data collection at a later date while continuing to use services.
A right to object to the sale or transfer of behavioural data, including to third-party ad networks and absolute opt-in on company transfer of ownership.
A requirement that advertising should be targeted to content, [user bought fridge A] not through jigsaw data held on users by the company [how user uses fridge A, B, C and related behaviour].
An absolute rejection of using children’s personal data gathered to target advertising and marketing at children
Background: Starting points before privacy
After a brief recap on 5 years ago, we heard two talks.
The first was a presentation from Bosch. They used the insights from the IoT open definition from 5 years ago in their IoT thinking and embedded it in their brand book. The presenter suggested that in five years time, every fridge Bosch sells will be ‘smart’. And the second was a fascinating presentation, of both EU thinking and the intellectual nudge to think beyond the practical and think what kind of society we want to see using the IoT in future. Hints of hardcore ethics and philosophy that made my brain fizz from Gerald Santucci, soon to retire from the European Commission.
The principles of open sourcing, manufacturing, and sustainable life cycle were debated in the afternoon with intense arguments and clearly knowledgeable participants, including those who were quiet. But while the group had assigned security, and started work on it weeks before, there was no one pre-assigned to privacy. For me, that said something. If they are serious about those who earn the trustmark being better for customers than their competition, then there needs to be greater emphasis on thinking like their customers, and by their customers, and what use the mark will be to customers, not companies. Plan early public engagement and testing into the design of this IoT mark, and make that testing open and diverse.
To that end, I believe it needed to be articulated more strongly, that sustainable public trust is the primary goal of the principles.
Trust that my device will not become unusable or worthless through updates or lack of them.
Trust that my device is manufactured safely and ethically and with thought given to end of life and the environment.
Trust that my source components are of high standards.
Trust in what data and how that data is gathered and used by the manufacturers.
Fundamental to ‘smart’ devices is their connection to the Internet, and so the last for me, is therefore key to successful public perception and it actually making a difference, beyond the PR value to companies. The value-add must be measured from consumers point of view.
All the openness about design functions and practice improvements, without attempting to change privacy infringing practices, may be wasted effort. Why? Because the perceived benefit of the value of the mark, will be proportionate to what risks it is seen to mitigate.
Why?
Because I assume that you know where your source components come from today. I was shocked to find out not all do and that ‘one degree removed’ is going to be an improvement? Holy cow, I thought. What about regulatory requirements for product safety recalls? These differ of course for different product areas, but I was still surprised. Having worked in global Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) and food industry, semiconductor and optoelectronics, and medical devices it was self-evident for me, that sourcing is rigorous. So that new requirement to know one degree removed, was a suggested minimum. But it might shock consumers to know there is not usually more by default.
Customers also believe they have reasonable expectations of not being screwed by a product update, left with something that does not work because of its computing based components. The public can take vocal, reputation-damaging action when they are let down.
While these are visible, the full extent of the overreach of company market and product surveillance into our whole lives, not just our living rooms, is yet to become understood by the general population. What will happen when it is?
The Internet of Things is exacerbating the power imbalance between consumers and companies, between government and citizens. As Wendy Grossman wrote recently, in one sense this may make privacy advocates’ jobs easier. It was always hard to explain why “privacy” mattered. Power, people understand.
That public discussion is long overdue. If open principles on IoT devices mean that the signed-up companies differentiate themselves by becoming market leaders in transparency, it will be a great thing. Companies need to offer full disclosure of data use in any privacy notices in clear, plain language under GDPR anyway, but to go beyond that, and offer customers fair presentation of both risks and customer benefits, will not only be a point-of-sales benefit, but potentially improve digital literacy in customers too.
The morning discussion touched quite often on pay-for-privacy models. While product makers may see this as offering a good thing, I strove to bring discussion back to first principles.
Privacy is a human right. There can be no ethical model of discrimination based on any non-consensual invasion of privacy. Privacy is not something I should pay to have. You should not design products that reduce my rights. GDPR requires privacy-by-design and data protection by default. Now is that chance for IoT manufacturers to lead that shift towards higher standards.
We also need a new ethics thinking on acceptable fair use. It won’t change overnight, and perfect may be the enemy of better. But it’s not a battle that companies should think consumers have lost. Human rights and information security should not be on the battlefield at all in the war to win customer loyalty. Now is the time to do better, to be better, demand better for us and in particular, for our children.
Privacy will be a genuine market differentiator
If manufacturers do not want to change their approach to exploiting customer data, they are unlikely to be seen to have changed.
Today feelings that people in US and Europe reflect in surveys are loss of empowerment, feeling helpless, and feeling used. That will shift to shock, resentment, and any change curve will predict, anger.
“The poll of just over two thousand British adults carried out by Ipsos MORI found that the media, internet services such as social media and search engines and telecommunication companies were the least trusted to use personal data appropriately.” [2014, Data trust deficit with lessons for policymakers, Royal Statistical Society]
In the British student population, one 2015 survey of university applicants in England, found of 37,000 who responded, the vast majority of UCAS applicants agree that sharing personal data can benefit them and support public benefit research into university admissions, but they want to stay firmly in control. 90% of respondents said they wanted to be asked for their consent before their personal data is provided outside of the admissions service.
In 2010, a multi method model of research with young people aged 14-18, by the Royal Society of Engineering, found that, “despite their openness to social networking, the Facebook generation have real concerns about the privacy of their medical records.” [2010, Privacy and Prejudice, RAE, Wellcome]
When people use privacy settings on Facebook set to maximum, they believe they get privacy, and understand little of what that means behind the scenes.
Are there tools designed by others, like Projects by If licenses, and ways this can be done, that you’re not even considering yet?
What if you don’t do it?
“But do you feel like you have privacy today?” I was asked the question in the afternoon. How do people feel today, and does it matter? Companies exploiting consumer data and getting caught doing things the public don’t expect with their data, has repeatedly damaged consumer trust. Data breaches and lack of information security have damaged consumer trust. Both cause reputational harm. Damage to reputation can harm customer loyalty. Damage to customer loyalty costs sales, profit and upsets the Board.
Where overreach into our living rooms has raised awareness of invasive data collection, we are yet to be able to see and understand the invasion of privacy into our thinking and nudge behaviour, into our perception of the world on social media, the effects on decision making that data analytics is enabling as data shows companies ‘how we think’, granting companies access to human minds in the abstract, even before Facebook is there in the flesh.
Governments want to see how we think too, and is thought crime really that far away using database labels of ‘domestic extremists’ for activists and anti-fracking campaigners, or the growing weight of policy makers attention given to predpol, predictive analytics, the [formerly] Cabinet Office Nudge Unit, Google DeepMind et al?
Had the internet remained decentralized the debate may be different.
I am starting to think of the IoT not as the Internet of Things, but as the Internet of Tracking. If some have their way, it will be the Internet of Thinking.
Considering our centralised Internet of Things model, our personal data from human interactions has become the network infrastructure, and data flows, are controlled by others. Our brains are the new data servers.
In the Internet of Tracking, people become the end nodes, not things.
And it is this where the future users will be so important. Do you understand and plan for factors that will drive push back, and crash of consumer confidence in your products, and take it seriously?
Companies have a choice to act as Empires would – multinationals, joining up even on low levels, disempowering individuals and sucking knowledge and power at the centre. Or they can act as Nation states ensuring citizens keep their sovereignty and control over a selected sense of self.
Look at Brexit. Look at the GE2017. Tell me, what do you see is the direction of travel? Companies can fight it, but will not defeat how people feel. No matter how much they hope ‘nudge’ and predictive analytics might give them this power, the people can take back control.
What might this desire to take-back-control mean for future consumer models? The afternoon discussion whilst intense, reached fairly simplistic concluding statements on privacy. We could have done with at least another hour.
Some in the group were frustrated “we seem to be going backwards” in current approaches to privacy and with GDPR.
But if the current legislation is reactive because companies have misbehaved, how will that be rectified for future? The challenge in the IoT both in terms of security and privacy, AND in terms of public perception and reputation management, is that you are dependent on the behaviours of the network, and those around you. Good and bad. And bad practices by one, can endanger others, in all senses.
If you believe that is going back to reclaim a growing sense of citizens’ rights, rather than accepting companies have the outsourced power to control the rights of others, that may be true.
There was a first principle asked whether any element on privacy was needed at all, if the text was simply to state, that the supplier of this product or service must be General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant. The GDPR was years in the making after all. Does it matter more in the IoT and in what ways? The room tended, understandably, to talk about it from the company perspective. “We can’t” “won’t” “that would stop us from XYZ.” Privacy would however be better addressed from the personal point of view.
What do people want?
From the company point of view, the language is different and holds clues. Openness, control, and user choice and pay for privacy are not the same thing as the basic human right to be left alone. Afternoon discussion reminded me of the 2014 WAPO article, discussing Mark Zuckerberg’s theory of privacy and a Palo Alto meeting at Facebook:
“Not one person ever uttered the word “privacy” in their responses to us. Instead, they talked about “user control” or “user options” or promoted the “openness of the platform.” It was as if a memo had been circulated that morning instructing them never to use the word “privacy.””
In the afternoon working group on privacy, there was robust discussion whether we had consensus on what privacy even means. Words like autonomy, control, and choice came up a lot. But it was only a beginning. There is opportunity for better. An academic voice raised the concept of sovereignty with which I agreed, but how and where to fit it into wording, which is at once both minimal and applied, and under a scribe who appeared frustrated and wanted a completely different approach from what he heard across the group, meant it was left out.
This group do care about privacy. But I wasn’t convinced that the room cared in the way that the public as a whole does, but rather only as consumers and customers do. But IoT products will affect potentially everyone, even those who do not buy your stuff. Everyone in that room, agreed on one thing. The status quo is not good enough. What we did not agree on, was why, and what was the minimum change needed to make a enough of a difference that matters.
I share the deep concerns of many child rights academics who see the harm that efforts to avoid restrictions Article 8 the GDPR will impose. It is likely to be damaging for children’s right to access information, be discriminatory according to parents’ prejudices or socio-economic status, and ‘cheating’ – requiring secrecy rather than privacy, in attempts to hide or work round the stringent system.
In ‘The Class’ the research showed, ” teachers and young people have a lot invested in keeping their spheres of interest and identity separate, under their autonomous control, and away from the scrutiny of each other.” [2016, Livingstone and Sefton-Green, p235]
Employers require staff use devices with single sign including web and activity tracking and monitoring software. Employee personal data and employment data are blended. Who owns that data, what rights will employees have to refuse what they see as excessive, and is it manageable given the power imbalance between employer and employee?
What is this doing in the classroom and boardroom for stress, anxiety, performance and system and social avoidance strategies?
A desire for convenience creates shortcuts, and these are often met using systems that require a sign-on through the platforms giants: Google, Facebook, Twitter, et al. But we are kept in the dark how by using these platforms, that gives access to them, and the companies, to see how our online and offline activity is all joined up.
Any illusion of privacy we maintain, we discussed, is not choice or control if based on ignorance, and backlash against companies lack of efforts to ensure disclosure and understanding is growing.
“The lack of accountability isn’t just troubling from a philosophical perspective. It’s dangerous in a political climate where people are pushing back at the very idea of globalization. There’s no industry more globalized than tech, and no industry more vulnerable to a potential backlash.”
If your connected *thing* requires registration, why does it? How about a commitment to not forcing one of these registration methods or indeed any at all? Social Media Research by Pew Research in 2016 found that 56% of smartphone owners ages 18 to 29 use auto-delete apps, more than four times the share among those 30-49 (13%) and six times the share among those 50 or older (9%).
Does that tell us anything about the demographics of data retention preferences?
In 2012, they suggested social media has changed the public discussion about managing “privacy” online. When asked, people say that privacy is important to them; when observed, people’s actions seem to suggest otherwise.
Does that tell us anything about how well companies communicate to consumers how their data is used and what rights they have?
There is also data with strong indications about how women act to protect their privacy more but when it comes to basic privacy settings, users of all ages are equally likely to choose a private, semi-private or public setting for their profile. There are no significant variations across age groups in the US sample.
Now think about why that matters for the IoT? I wonder who makes the bulk of purchasing decsions about household white goods for example and has Bosch factored that into their smart-fridges-only decision?
Do you *need* to know who the user is? Can the smart user choose to stay anonymous at all?
The day’s morning challenge was to attend more than one interesting discussion happening at the same time. As invariably happens, the session notes and quotes are always out of context and can’t possibly capture everything, no matter how amazing the volunteer (with thanks!). But here are some of the discussion points from the session on the body and health devices, the home, and privacy. It also included a discussion on racial discrimination, algorithmic bias, and the reasons why care.data failed patients and failed as a programme. We had lengthy discussion on ethics and privacy: smart meters, objections to models of price discrimination, and why pay-for-privacy harms the poor by design.
Smart meter data can track the use of unique appliances inside a person’s home and intimate patterns of behaviour. Information about our consumption of power, what and when every day, reveals personal details about everyday lives, our interactions with others, and personal habits.
Why should company convenience come above the consumer’s? Why should government powers, trump personal rights?
Smart meter is among the knowledge that government is exploiting, without consent, to discover a whole range of issues, including ensuring that “Troubled Families are identified”. Knowing how dodgy some of the school behaviour data might be, that helps define who is “troubled” there is a real question here, is this sound data science? How are errors identified? What about privacy? It’s not your policy, but if it is your product, what are your responsibilities?
If companies do not respect children’s rights, you’d better shape up to be GDPR compliant
For children and young people, more vulnerable to nudge, and while developing their sense of self can involve forming, and questioning their identity, these influences need oversight or be avoided.
In terms of GDPR, providers are going to pay particular attention to Article 8 ‘information society services’ and parental consent, Article 17 on profiling, and rights to restriction of processing (19) right to erasure in recital 65 and rights to portability. (20) However, they may need to simply reassess their exploitation of children and young people’s personal data and behavioural data. Article 57 requires special attention to be paid by regulators to activities specifically targeted at children, as ‘vulnerable natural persons’ of recital 75.
Human Rights, regulations and conventions overlap in similar principles that demand respect for a child, and right to be let alone:
(a) The development of the child ‘s personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential;
(b) The development of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and for the principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations.
A weakness of the GDPR is that it allows derogation on age and will create inequality and inconsistency for children as a result. By comparison Article one of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) defines who is to be considered a “child” for the purposes of the CRC, and states that: “For the purposes of the present Convention, a child means every human being below the age of eighteen years unless, under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier.”<
Article two of the CRC says that States Parties shall respect and ensure the rights set forth in the present Convention to each child within their jurisdiction without discrimination of any kind.
CRC Article 16 says that no child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her honour and reputation.
Article 8 CRC requires respect for the right of the child to preserve his or her identity […] without unlawful interference.
Article 12 CRC demands States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.
That stands in potential conflict with GDPR article 8. There is much on GDPR on derogations by country, and or children, still to be set.
What next for our data in the wild
Hosting the event at the zoo offered added animals, and during a lunch tour we got out on a tour, kindly hosted by a fellow participant. We learned how smart technology was embedded in some of the animal enclosures, and work on temperature sensors with penguins for example. I love tigers, so it was a bonus that we got to see such beautiful and powerful animals up close, if a little sad for their circumstances and as a general basic principle, seeing big animals caged as opposed to in-the-wild.
Freedom is a common desire in all animals. Physical, mental, and freedom from control by others.
I think any manufacturer that underestimates this element of human instinct is ignoring the ‘hidden dragon’ that some think is a myth. Privacy is not dead. It is not extinct, or even unlike the beautiful tigers, endangered. Privacy in the IoT at its most basic, is the right to control our purchasing power. The ultimate people power waiting to be sprung. Truly a crouching tiger. People object to being used and if companies continue to do so without full disclosure, they do so at their peril. Companies seem all-powerful in the battle for privacy, but they are not. Even insurers and data brokers must be fair and lawful, and it is for regulators to ensure that practices meet the law.
When consumers realise our data, our purchasing power has the potential to control, not be controlled, that balance will shift.
“Paper tigers” are superficially powerful but are prone to overextension that leads to sudden collapse. If that happens to the superficially powerful companies that choose unethical and bad practice, as a result of better data privacy and data ethics, then bring it on.
I hope that the IoT mark can champion best practices and make a difference to benefit everyone.
While the companies involved in its design may be interested in consumers, I believe it could be better for everyone, done well. The great thing about the efforts into an #IoTmark is that it is a collective effort to improve the whole ecosystem.
I hope more companies will realise their privacy rights and ethical responsibility in the world to all people, including those interested in just being, those who want to be let alone, and not just those buying.
“If a cat is called a tiger it can easily be dismissed as a paper tiger; the question remains however why one was so scared of the cat in the first place.”
Further reading: Networks of Control – A Report on Corporate Surveillance, Digital Tracking, Big Data & Privacy by Wolfie Christl and Sarah Spiekermann
Is Education preparing us for the jobs of the future?
The panel talked about changing social and political realities. We considered the effects on employment. We began discussion how those changes should feed into education policy and practice today. It is discussion that should be had by the public. So far, almost a year after the Referendum, the UK government is yet to say what post-Brexit Britain might look like. Without a vision, any mandate for the unknown, if voted for on June 9th, will be meaningless.
What was talked about and what should be a public debate:
What jobs will be needed in the future?
Post Brexit, what skills will we need in the UK?
How can the education system adapt and improve to help future generations develop skills in this ever changing landscape?
How do we ensure women [and anyone else] are not left behind?
Brexit is the biggest change management project I may never see.
As the State continues making and remaking laws, reforming education, and starts exiting the EU, all in parallel, technology and commercial companies won’t wait to see what the post-Brexit Britain will look like. In our state’s absence of vision, companies are shaping policy and ‘re-writing’ their own version of regulations. What implications could this have for long term public good?
What will be needed in the UK future?
A couple of sentences from Alan Penn have stuck with me all week. Loosely quoted, we’re seeing cultural identity shift across the country, due to the change of our available employment types. Traditional industries once ran in a family, with a strong sense of heritage. New jobs don’t offer that. It leaves a gap we cannot fill with “I’m a call centre worker”. And this change is unevenly felt.
There is no tangible public plan in the Digital Strategy for dealing with that change in the coming 10 to 20 years employment market and what it means tied into education. It matters when many believe, as do these authors in American Scientific, “around half of today’s jobs will be threatened by algorithms. 40% of today’s top 500 companies will have vanished in a decade.”
So what needs thought?
Analysis of what that regional jobs market might look like, should be a public part of the Brexit debate and these elections →
We need to see those goals, to ensure policy can be planned for education and benchmark its progress towards achieving its aims
Brexit and technology will disproportionately affect different segments of the jobs market and therefore the population by age, by region, by socio-economic factors →
Education policy must therefore address aspects of skills looking to the future towards employment in that new environment, so that we make the most of opportunities, and mitigate the harms.
Brexit and technology will disproportionately affect communities → What will be done to prevent social collapse in regions hardest hit by change?
Where are we starting from today?
Before we can understand the impact of change, we need to understand what the present looks like. I cannot find a map of what the English education system looks like. No one I ask seems to have one or have a firm grasp across the sector, of how and where all the parts of England’s education system fit together, or their oversight and accountability. Everyone has an idea, but no one can join the dots. If you have, please let me know.
Nothing is constant in education like change; in laws, policy and its effects in practice, so I shall start there.
1. Legislation
In retrospect it was a fatal flaw, missed in post-Referendum battles of who wrote what on the side of a bus, that no one did an assessment of education [and indeed other] ‘legislation in progress’. There should have been recommendations made on scrapping inappropriate government bills in entirety or in parts. New laws are now being enacted, rushed through in wash up, that are geared to our old status quo, and we risk basing policy only on what we know from the past, because on that, we have data.
In the timeframe that Brexit will become tangible, we will feel the effects of the greatest shake up of Higher Education in 25 years. Parts of the Higher Education and Research Act, and Technical and Further Education Act are unsuited to the new order post-Brexit.
What it will do: The new HE law encourages competition between institutions, and the TFE Act centred in large part on how to manage insolvency.
What it should do: Policy needs to promote open, collaborative networks if within a now reduced research and academic circle, scholarly communities are to thrive.
Legislation has recently not only meant restructure, but repurposing of what education [authorities] is expected to offer.
A new Statutory Instrument — The School and Early Years Finance (England) Regulations 2017 — makes music, arts and playgrounds items; ‘That may be removed from maintained schools’ budget shares’.
How will this withdrawal of provision affect skills starting from the Early Years throughout young people’s education?
2. Policy
Education policy if it continues along the grammar school path, will divide communities into ‘passed’ and the ‘unselected’. A side effect of selective schooling— a feature or a bug dependent on your point of view — is socio-economic engineering. It builds class walls in the classroom, while others, like Fabian Women, say we should be breaking through glass ceilings. Current policy in a wider sense, is creating an environment that is hostile to human integration. It creates division across the entire education system for children aged 2–19.
The curriculum is narrowing, according to staff I’ve spoken to recently, as a result of measurement focus on Progress 8, and due to funding constraints.
What effect will this have on analysis of knowledge, discernment, how to assess when computers have made a mistake or supplied misinformation, and how to apply wisdom? Skills that today still distinguish human from machine learning.
What narrowing the curriculum does: Students have fewer opportunities to discover their skill set, limiting opportunities for developing social skills and cultural development, and their development as rounded, happy, human beings.
What we could do: Promote long term love of learning in-and-outside school and in communities. Reinvest in the arts, music and play, which support mental and physical health and create a culture in which people like to live as well as work. Library and community centres funding must be re-prioritised, ensuring inclusion and provision outside school for all abilities.
Austerity builds barriers of access to opportunity and skills. Children who cannot afford to, are excluded from extra curricular classes. We already divide our children through private and state education, into those who have better facilities and funding to enjoy and explore a fully rounded education, and those whose funding will not stretch much beyond the bare curriculum. For SEN children, that has already been stripped back further.
Existing barriers are likely to become entrenched in twenty years. What does it do to society, if we are divided in our communities by money, or gender, or race, and feel disempowered as individuals? Are we less responsible for our actions if there’s nothing we can do about it? If others have more money, more power than us, others have more control over our lives, and “no matter what we do, we won’t pass the 11 plus”?
Without joined-up scrutiny of these policy effects across the board, we risk embedding these barriers into future planning. Today’s data are used to train “how the system should work”. If current data are what applicants in 5 years will base future expectations on, will their decisions be objective and will in-built bias be transparent?
3. Sociological effects of legislation.
It’s not only institutions that will lose autonomy in the Higher Education and Research Act.
At present, the risk to the autonomy of science and research is theoretical — but the implications for academic freedom are troubling. [Nature 538, 5 (06 October 2016)]
The Secretary of State for Education now also has new Powers of Information about individual applicants and students. Combined with the Digital Economy Act, the law can ride roughshod over students’ autonomy and consent choices. Today they can opt out of UCAS automatically sharing their personal data with the Student Loans Company for example. Thanks to these new powers, and combined with the Digital Economy Act, that’s gone.
The Act further includes the intention to make institutions release more data about course intake and results under the banner of ‘transparency’. Part of the aim is indisputably positive, to expose discrimination and inequality of all kinds. It also aims to make the £ cost-benefit return “clearer” to applicants — by showing what exams you need to get in, what you come out with, and then by joining all that personal data to the longitudinal school record, tax and welfare data, you see what the return is on your student loan. The government can also then see what your education ‘cost or benefit’ the Treasury. It is all of course much more nuanced than that, but that’s the very simplified gist.
This ‘destinations data’ is going to be a dataset we hear ever more about and has the potential to influence education policy from age 2.
Aside from the issue of personal data disclosiveness when published by institutions — we already know of individuals who could spot themselves in a current published dataset — I worry that this direction using data for ‘advice’ is unhelpful. What if we’re looking at the wrong data upon which to base future decisions? The past doesn’t take account of Brexit or enable applicants to do so.
Researchers [and applicants, the year before they apply or start a course] will be looking at what *was* — predicted and achieved qualifying grades, make up of the class, course results, first job earnings — what was for other people, is at least 5 years old by the time it’s looked at it. Five years is a long time out of date.
4. Change
Teachers and schools have long since reached saturation point in the last 5 years to handle change. Reform has been drastic, in structures, curriculum, and ongoing in funding. There is no ongoing teacher training, and lack of CPD take up, is exacerbated by underfunding.
Teachers are fed up with change. They want stability. But contrary to the current “strong and stable” message, reality is that ahead we will get anything but, and must instead manage change if we are to thrive. Politically, we will see backlash when ‘stable’ is undeliverable.
But Teaching has not seen ‘stable’ for some time. Teachers are asking for fewer children, and more cash in the classroom. Unions talk of a focus on learning, not testing, to drive school standards. If the planned restructuring of funding happens, how will it affect staff retention?
We know schools are already reducing staff. How will this affect employment, adult and children’s skill development, their ambition, and society and economy?
Where could legislation and policy look ahead?
What are the big Brexit targets and barriers and when do we expect them?
How is the fall out from underfunding and reduction of teaching staff expected to affect skills provision?
State education policy is increasingly hands-off. What is the incentive for local schools or MATs to look much beyond the short term?
How do local decisions ensure education is preparing their community, but also considering society, health and (elderly) social care, Post-Brexit readiness and women’s economic empowerment?
How does our ageing population shift in the same time frame?
How can the education system adapt?
We need to talk more about other changes in the system in parallel to Brexit; join the dots, plus the potential positive and harmful effects of technology.
Gender here too plays a role, as does mitigating discrimination of all kinds, confirmation bias, and even in the tech itself, whether AI for example, is going to be better than us at decision-making, if we teach AI to be biased.
Dr Lisa Maria Mueller talked about the effects and influence of age, setting and language factors on what skills we will need, and employment. While there are certain skills sets that computers are and will be better at than people, she argued society also needs to continue to cultivate human skills in cultural sensitivities, empathy, and understanding. We all nodded. But how?
To develop all these human skills is going to take investment. Investment in the humans that teach us. Bennie Kara, Assistant Headteacher in London, spoke about school cuts and how they will affect children’s futures.
The future of England’s education must be geared to a world in which knowledge and facts are ubiquitous, and readily available online than at any other time. And access to learning must be inclusive. That means including SEN and low income families, the unskilled, everyone. As we become more internationally remote, we must put safeguards in place if we to support thriving communities.
Policy and legislation must also preserve and respect human dignity in a changing work environment, and review not only what work is on offer, but *how*; the kinds of contracts and jobs available.
Where might practice need to adapt now?
Re-consider curriculum content with its focus on facts. Will success risk being measured based on out of date knowledge, and a measure of recall? Are these skills in growing or dwindling need?
Knowledge focus must place value on analysis, discernment, and application of facts that computers will learn and recall better than us. Much of that learning happens outside school.
Opportunities have been cut, together with funding. We need communities brought back together, if they are not to collapse. Funding centres of local learning, restoring libraries and community centres will be essential to local skill development.
What is missing?
Although Sarah Waite spoke (in a suitably Purdah appropriate tone), about the importance of basic skills in the future labour market we didn’t get to talking about education preparing us for the lack of jobs of the future and what that changed labour market will look like.
What skills will *not* be needed? Who decides? If left to companies’ sponsor led steer in academies, what effects will we see in society?
Discussions of a future education model and technology seem to share a common theme: people seem reduced in making autonomous choices. But they share no positive vision.
Technology should empower us, but it seems to empower the State and diminish citizens’ autonomy in many of today’s policies, and in future scenarios especially around the use of personal data and Digital Economy.
Technology should enable greater collaboration, but current tech in education policy is focused too little on use on children’s own terms, and too heavily on top-down monitoring: of scoring, screen time, search terms. Further restrictions by Age Verification are coming, and may access and reduce participation in online services if not done well.
Infrastructure weakness is letting down the skill training: University Technical Colleges (UTCs) are not popular and failing to fill places. There is lack of an overarching area wide strategic plan for pupils in which UTCS play a part. Local Authorities played an important part in regional planning which needs restored to ensure joined up local thinking.
How do we ensure women are not left behind?
The final question of the evening asked how women will be affected by Brexit and changing job market. Part of the risks overall, the panel concluded, is related to [lack of] equal-pay. But where are the assessments of the gendered effects in the UK of:
community structural change and intra-family support and effect on demand for social care
tech solutions in response to lack of human interaction and staffing shortages including robots in the home and telecare
the disproportionate drop out of work, due to unpaid care roles, and difficulty getting back in after a break.
the roles and types of work likely to be most affected or replaced by machine learning and robots
and how will women be empowered or not socially by technology?
We quickly need in education to respond to the known data where women are already being left behind now. The attrition rate for example in teaching in England after two-three years is poor, and getting worse. What will government do to keep teachers teaching? Their value as role models is not captured in pupils’ exams results based entirely on knowledge transfer.
Our GCSEs this year go back to pure exam based testing, and remove applied coursework marking, and is likely to see lower attainment for girls than boys, say practitioners. Likely to leave girls behind at an earlier age.
“There is compelling evidence to suggest that girls in particular may be affected by the changes — as research suggests that boys perform more confidently when assessed by exams alone.”
Jennifer Tuckett spoke about what fairness might look like for female education in the Creative Industries. From school-leaver to returning mother, and retraining older women, appreciating the effects of gender in education is intrinsic to the future jobs market.
We also need broader public understanding of the loop of the impacts of technology, on the process and delivery of teaching itself, and as school management becomes increasingly important and is male dominated, how will changes in teaching affect women disproportionately? Fact delivery and testing can be done by machine, and supports current policy direction, but can a computer create a love of learning and teach humans how to think?
“There is a opportunity for a holistic synthesis of research into gender, the effect of tech on the workplace, the effect of technology on care roles, risks and opportunities.”
Delivering education to ensure women are not left behind, includes avoiding women going into education as teenagers now, to be led down routes without thinking of what they want and need in future. Regardless of work.
Education must adapt to changed employment markets, and the social and community effects of Brexit. If it does not, barriers will become embedded. Geographical, economic, language, familial, skills, and social exclusion.
In short
In summary, what is the government’s Brexit vision? We must know what they see five, 10, and for 25 years ahead, set against understanding the landscape as-is, in order to peg other policy to it.
With this foundation, what we know and what we estimate we don’t know yet can be planned for.
Once we know where we are going in policy, we can do a fit-gap to map how to get people there.
Estimate which skills gaps need filled and which do not. Where will change be hardest?
Change is not new. But there is current potential for massive long term economic and social lasting damage to our young people today. Government is hindered by short term political thinking, but it has a long-term responsibility to ensure children are not mis-educated because policy and the future environment are not aligned.
We deserve public, transparent, informed debate to plan our lives.
We enter the unknown of the education triangle at our peril; Brexit, underfunding, divisive structural policy, for the next ten years and beyond, without appropriate adjustment to pre-Brexit legislation and policy plans for the new world order.
The combined negative effects on employment at scale and at pace must be assessed with urgency, not by big Tech who will profit, but with an eye on future fairness, and public economic and social good. Academy sponsors, decision makers in curriculum choices, schools with limited funding, have no incentives to look to the wider world.
If we’re going to go it alone, we’d be better be robust as a society, and that can’t be just some of us, and can’t only be about skills as seen as having an tangible output.
All this discussion is framed by the premise that education’s aim is to prepare a future workforce for work, and that it is sustainable.
Policy is increasingly based on work that is measured by economic output. We must not leave out or behind those who do not, or cannot, or whose work is unmeasured yet contributes to the world.
‘The only future worth building includes everyone,’ said the Pope in a recent TedTalk.
What kind of future do you want to see yourself living in? Will we all work or will there be universal basic income? What will happen on housing, an ageing population, air pollution, prisons, free movement, migration, and health? What will keep communities together as their known world in employment, and family life, and support collapse? How will education enable children to discover their talents and passions?
Human beings are more than what we do. The sense of a country of who we are and what we stand for is about more than our employment or what we earn. And we cannot live on slogans alone.
Who do we think we in the UK will be after Brexit, needs real and substantial answers. What are we going to *do* and *be* in the world?
Without this vision, any mandate as voted for on June 9th, will be made in the dark and open to future objection writ large. ‘We’ must be inclusive based on a consensus, not simply a ‘mandate’.
Only with clear vision for all these facets fitting together in a model of how we will grow in all senses, will we be able to answer the question, is education preparing us [all] for the jobs of the future?
More than this, we must ask if education is preparing people for the lack of jobs, for changing relationships in our communities, with each other, and with machines.
Change is coming, Brexit or not. But Brexit has exacerbated the potential to miss opportunities, embed barriers, and see negative side-effects from changes already underway in employment, in an accelerated timeframe.
If our education policy today is not gearing up to that change, we must.
In preparation for The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) there must be an active UK decision about policy in the coming months for children and the Internet – provision of ‘Information Society Services’. The age of consent for online content aimed at children from May 25, 2018 will be 16 by default unless UK law is made to lower it.
Age verification for online information services in the GDPR, will mean capturing parent-child relationships. This could mean a parent’s email or credit card unless there are other choices made. What will that mean for access to services for children and to privacy? It is likely to offer companies an opportunity for a data grab, and mean privacy loss for the public, as more data about family relationships will be created and collected than the content provider would get otherwise.
Our interactions create a blended identity of online and offline attributes which I suggested in a previous post, create synthesised versions of our selves raises questions on data privacy and security.
The goal may be to protect the physical child. The outcome will mean it simultaneously expose children and parents to risks that we would not otherwise be put through increased personal data collection. By increasing the data collected, it increases the associated risks of loss, theft, and harm to identity integrity. How will legislation balance these risks and rights to participation?
The UK government has various work in progress before then, that could address these questions:
As Sonia Livingstone wrote in the post on the LSE media blog about what to expect from the GDPR and its online challenges for children:
“Now the UK, along with other Member States, has until May 2018 to get its house in order”.
What will that order look like?
The Digital Strategy and Ed Tech
The Digital Strategy commits to changes in National Pupil Data management. That is, changes in the handling and secondary uses of data collected from pupils in the school census, like using it for national research and planning.
Access to NPD via the ONS VML would mean safe data use, in safe settings, by safe (trained and accredited) users.
Sensitive data — it remains to be seen how DfE intends to interpret ‘sensitive’ and whether that is the DPA1998 term or lay term meaning ‘identifying’ as it should — will no longer be seen by users for secondary uses outside safe settings.
However, a grey area on privacy and security remains in the “Data Exchange” which will enable EdTech products to “talk to each other”.
The aim of changes in data access is to ensure that children’s data integrity and identity are secure. Let’s hope the intention that “at all times, the need to preserve appropriate privacy and security will remain paramount and will be non-negotiable” applies across all closed pupil data, and not only to that which may be made available via the VML.
This strategy is still far from clear or set in place.
The Digital Strategy and consumer data rights
The Digital Strategy commits under the heading of “Unlocking the power of data in the UK economy and improving public confidence in its use” to the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation by May 2018. The Strategy frames this as a business issue, labelling data as “a global commodity” and as such, its handling is framed solely as a requirements needed to ensure “that our businesses can continue to compete and communicate effectively around the world” and that adoption “will ensure a shared and higher standard of protection for consumers and their data.”
The GDPR as far as children goes, is far more about protection of children as people. It focuses on returning control over children’s own identity and being able to revoke control by others, rather than consumer rights.
That said, there are data rights issues which are also consumer issues and product safety failures posing real risk of harm.
Neither The Digital Economy Bill nor the Digital Strategy address these rights and security issues, particularly when posed by the Internet of Things with any meaningful effect.
In fact, the chapter Internet of Things and Smart Infrastructure [ 9/19] singularly miss out anything on security and safety:
“We want the UK to remain an international leader in R&D and adoption of IoT. We are funding research and innovation through the three year, £30 million IoT UK Programme.”
If it’s not scary enough for the public to think that their sex secrets and devices are hackable, perhaps it will kill public trust in connected devices more when they find strangers talking to their children through a baby monitor or toy. [BEUC campaign report on #Toyfail]
“The internet-connected toys ‘My Friend Cayla’ and ‘i-Que’ fail miserably when it comes to safeguarding basic consumer rights, security, and privacy. Both toys are sold widely in the EU.”
Digital skills and training in the strategy doesn’t touch on any form of change management plans for existing working sectors in which we expect to see machine learning and AI change the job market. This is something the digital and industrial strategy must be addressing hand in glove.
The tactics and training providers listed sound super, but there does not appear to be an aspirational strategy hidden between the lines.
The Digital Economy Bill and citizens’ data rights
While the rest of Europe in this legislation has recognised that a future thinking digital world without boundaries, needs future thinking on data protection and empowered citizens with better control of identity, the UK government appears intent on taking ours away.
To take only one example for children, the Digital Economy Bill in Cabinet Office led meetings was explicit about use for identifying and tracking individuals labelled under “Troubled Families” and interventions with them. Why, when consent is required to work directly with people, that consent is being ignored to access their information is baffling and in conflict with both the spirit and letter of GDPR. Students and Applicants will see their personal data sent to the Student Loans Company without their consent or knowledge. This overrides the current consent model in place at UCAS.
It is baffling that the government is pursuing the Digital Economy Bill data copying clauses relentlessly, that remove confidentiality by default, and will release our identities in birth, marriage and death data for third party use without consent through Chapter 2, the opening of the Civil Registry, without any safeguards in the bill.
Government has not only excluded important aspects of Parliamentary scrutiny in the bill, it is trying to introduce “almost untrammeled powers” (paragraph 21), that will “very significantly broaden the scope for the sharing of information” and “specified persons” which applies “whether the service provider concerned is in the public sector or is a charity or a commercial organisation” and non-specific purposes for which the information may be disclosed or used. [Reference: Scrutiny committee comments]
Future changes need future joined up thinking
While it is important to learn from the past, I worry that the effort some social scientists put into looking backwards, is not matched by enthusiasm to look ahead and making active recommendations for a better future.
Society appears to have its eyes wide shut to the risks of coercive control and nudge as research among academics and government departments moves in the direction of predictive data analysis.
Uses of administrative big data and publicly available social media data for example, in research and statistics, needs further new regulation in practice and policy but instead the Digital Economy Bill looks only at how more data can be got out of Department silos.
A certain intransigence about data sharing with researchers from government departments is understandable. What’s the incentive for DWP to release data showing its policy may kill people?
Westminster may fear it has more to lose from data releases and don’t seek out the political capital to be had from good news.
The ethics of data science are applied patchily at best in government, and inconsistently in academic expectations.
Some researchers have identified this but there seems little will to action:
“It will no longer be possible to assume that secondary data use is ethically unproblematic.”
Research and legislation alike seem hell bent on the low hanging fruit but miss out the really hard things. What meaningful benefit will it bring by spending millions of pounds on exploiting these personal data and opening our identities to risk just to find out whether X course means people are employed in Y tax bracket 5 years later, versus course Z where everyone ends up self employed artists? What ethics will be applied to the outcomes of those questions asked and why?
And while government is busy joining up children’s education data throughout their lifetimes from age 2 across school, FE, HE, into their HMRC and DWP interactions, there is no public plan in the Digital Strategy for the coming 10 to 20 years employment market, when many believe, as do these authors in American Scientific, “around half of today’s jobs will be threatened by algorithms. 40% of today’s top 500 companies will have vanished in a decade.”
What benefit will it have to know what was, or for the plans around workforce and digital skills list ad hoc tactics, but no strategy?
We must safeguard jobs and societal needs, but just teaching people to code is not a solution to a fundamental gap in what our purpose will be, and the place of people as a world-leading tech nation after Brexit. We are going to have fewer talented people from across the world staying on after completing academic studies, because they’re not coming at all.
There may be investment in A.I. but where is the investment in good data practices around automation and machine learning in the Digital Economy Bill?
To do this Digital Strategy well, we need joined up thinking.
Children should be able to use online services without being used and abused by them.
This article arrived on my Twitter timeline via a number of people. Doteveryone CEO Rachel Coldicutt summed up various strands of thought I started to hear hints of last month at #CPDP2017 in Brussels:
“As designers and engineers, we’ve contributed to a post-thought world. In 2017, it’s time to start making people think again.
“We need to find new ways of putting friction and thoughtfulness back into the products we make.” [Glanceable truthiness, 30.1.2017]
Let’s keep the human in discussions about technology, and people first in our products
All too often in technology and even privacy discussions, people have become ‘consumers’ and ‘customers’ instead of people.
The Digital Strategy may seek to unlock “the power of data in the UK economy” but policy and legislation must put equal if not more emphasis on “improving public confidence in its use” if that long term opportunity is to be achieved.
And in technology discussions about AI and algorithms we hear very little about people at all. Discussions I hear seem siloed instead into three camps: the academics, the designers and developers, the politicians and policy makers. And then comes the lowest circle, ‘the public’ and ‘society’.
It is therefore unsurprising that human rights have fallen down the ranking of importance in some areas of technology development.
The Higher Education and Research Bill sucks in personal data to the centre, as well as power. It creates an authoritarian panopticon of the people within the higher education and further education systems. Section 1, parts 72-74 creates risks but offers no safeguards.
Applicants and students’ personal data is being shifted into a top-down management model, at the same time as the horizontal safeguards for its distribution are to be scrapped.
Through deregulation and the building of a centralised framework, these bills will weaken the purposes for which personal data are collected, and weaken existing requirements on consent to which the data may be used at national level. Without amendments, every student who enters this system will find their personal data used at the discretion of any future Secretary of State for Education without safeguards or oversight, and forever. Goodbye privacy.
But in addition and separately, the Bill will permit data to be used at the discretion of the Secretary of State, which waters down and removes nuances of consent for what data may or may not be used today when applicants sign up to UCAS.
Applicants today are told in the privacy policy they can consent separately to sharing their data with the Student Loans company for example. This Bill will remove that right when it permits all Applicant data to be used by the State.
This removal of today’s consent process denies all students their rights to decide who may use their personal data beyond the purposes for which they permit its sharing.
And it explicitly overrides the express wishes registered by the 28,000 applicants, 66% of respondents to a 2015 UCAS survey, who said as an example, that they should be asked before any data was provided to third parties for student loan applications (or even that their data should never be provided for this).
Not only can the future purposes be changed without limitation, by definition, when combined with other legislation, namely the Digital Economy Bill that is in the Lords at the same time right now, this shift will pass personal data together with DWP and in connection with HMRC data expressly to the Student Loans Company.
In just this one example, the Higher Education and Research Bill is being used as a man in the middle. But it will enable all data for broad purposes, and if those expand in future, we’ll never know.
This change, far from making more data available to public interest research, shifts the balance of power between state and citizen and undermines the very fabric of its source of knowledge; the creation and collection of personal data.
Further, a number of amendments have been proposed in the Lords to clause 9 (the transparency duty) which raise more detailed privacy issues for all prospective students, concerns UCAS share.
Why this lack of privacy by design is damaging
This shift takes away our control, and gives it to the State at the very time when ‘take back control’ is in vogue. These bills are building a foundation for a data Brexit.
And without future limitation, what might be imposed is unknown.
This shortsightedness will ultimately cause damage to data integrity and the damage won’t come in education data from the Higher Education Bill alone. The Higher Education and Research Bill is just one of three bills sweeping through Parliament right now which build a cumulative anti-privacy storm together, in what is labelled overtly as data sharing legislation or is hidden in tucked away clauses.
Unlike the Higher Education and Research Bill, it may not fundamentally changing how the State gathers information on further education, but it has the potential to do so on use.
The change is a generalisation of purposes. Currently, subsection 1 of section 54 refers to “purposes of the exercise of any of the functions of the Secretary of State under Part 4 of the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009”.
Therefore, the government argues, “it would not hold good in circumstances where certain further education functions were transferred from the Secretary of State to some combined authorities in England, which is due to happen in 2018.”<
This is why clause 38 will amend that wording to “purposes connected with further education”.
Whatever the details of the reason, the purposes are broader.
Again, combined with the Digital Economy Bill’s open ended purposes, it means the Secretary of State could agree to pass these data on to every other government department, a range of public bodies, and some private organisations.
These loose purposes, without future restrictions, definitions of third parties it could be given to or why, or clear need to consult the public or parliament on future scope changes, is a repeat of similar legislative changes which have resulted in poor data practices using school pupil data in England age 2-19 since 2000.
Policy makers should consider whether the intent of these three bills is to give out identifiable, individual level, confidential data of young people under 18, for commercial use without their consent? Or to journalists and charities access? Should it mean unfettered access by government departments and agencies such as police and Home Office Removals Casework teams without any transparent register of access, any oversight, or accountability?
These are today’s uses by third-parties of school children’s individual, identifiable and sensitive data from the National Pupil Database.
Uses of data not as statistics, but named individuals for interventions in individual lives.
Hoping that the data transfers to the Home Office won’t result in the deportation of thousands we would not predict today, may be naive.
Under the new open wording, the Secretary of State for Education might even decide to sell the nation’s entire Technical and Further Education student data to Trump University for the purposes of their ‘research’ to target marketing at UK students or institutions that may be potential US post-grad applicants. The Secretary of State will have the data simply because she “may require [it] for purposes connected with further education.”
And to think US buyers or others would not be interested is too late.
In 2015 Stanford University made a request of the National Pupil Database for both academic staff and students’ data. It was rejected. We know this only from the third party release register. Without any duty to publish requests, approved users or purposes of data release, where is the oversight for use of these other datasets?
If these are not the intended purposes of these three bills, if there should be any limitation on purposes of use and future scope change, then safeguards and oversight need built into the face of the bills to ensure data privacy is protected and avoid repeating the same again.
Hoping that the decision is always going to be, ‘they wouldn’t approve a request like that’ is not enough to protect millions of students privacy.
The three bills are a perfect privacy storm
As other Europeans seek to strengthen the fundamental rights of their citizens to take back control of their personal data under the GDPR coming into force in May 2018, the UK government is pre-emptively undermining ours in these three bills.
Young people, and data dependent institutions, are asking for solutions to show what personal data is held where, and used by whom, for what purposes. That buys in the benefit message that builds trust showing what you said you’d do with my data, is what you did with my data. [1] [2]
Reality is that in post-truth politics it seems anything goes, on both sides of the Pond. So how will we trust what our data is used for?
2015-16 advice from the cross party Science and Technology Committee suggested data privacy is unsatisfactory, “to be left unaddressed by Government and without a clear public-policy position set out“. We hear the need for data privacy debated about use of consumer data, social media, and on using age verification. It’s necessary to secure the public trust needed for long term public benefit and for economic value derived from data to be achieved.
But the British government seems intent on shortsighted legislation which does entirely the opposite for its own use: in the Higher Education Bill, the Technical and Further Education Bill and in the Digital Economy Bill.
These bills share what Baroness Chakrabarti said of the Higher Education Bill in its Lords second reading on the 6th December, “quite an achievement for a policy to combine both unnecessary authoritarianism with dangerous degrees of deregulation.”
Unchecked these Bills create the conditions needed for catastrophic failure of public trust. They shift ever more personal data away from personal control, into the centralised control of the Secretary of State for unclear purposes and use by undefined third parties. They jeopardise the collection and integrity of public administrative data.
To future-proof the immediate integrity of student personal data collection and use, the DfE reputation, and public and professional trust in DfE political leadership, action must be taken on safeguards and oversight, and should consider:
Transparency register: a public record of access, purposes, and benefits to be achieved from use
Subject Access Requests: Providing the public ways to access copies of their own data
Consent procedures should be strengthened for collection and cannot say one thing, and do another
Ability to withdraw consent from secondary purposes should be built in by design, looking to GDPR from 2018
Clarification of the legislative purpose of intended current use by the Secretary of State and its boundaries shoud be clear
Future purpose and scope change limitations should require consultation – data collected today must not used quite differently tomorrow without scrutiny and ability to opt out (i.e. population wide registries of religion, ethnicity, disability)
Review or sunset clause
If the legislation in these three bills pass without amendment, the potential damage to privacy will be lasting.
Schools Minister Nick Gibb responded on July 25th 2016: ”
“These new data items will provide valuable statistical information on the characteristics of these groups of children […] “The data will be collected solely for internal Departmental use for the analytical, statistical and research purposes described above. There are currently no plans to share the data with other government Departments”
[2] December 15, publication of MOU between the Home Office Casework Removals Team and the DfE, reveals “the previous agreement “did state that DfE would provide nationality information to the Home Office”, but that this was changed “following discussions” between the two departments.” http://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfe-had-agreement-to-share-pupil-nationality-data-with-home-office/
The agreement was changed on 7th October 2016 to not pass nationality data over. It makes no mention of not using the data within the DfE for the same purposes.
