As we lose our privacy, public bodies are erecting walls around theirs
It is one of the paradoxes of our time: as we hand over our holiday snaps to Facebook, and our browsing data to companies with each impatient click-close of a cookies pop-up, our institutions became ever more secretive.
This week has provided a litany of new examples, and the justifications are various. MPS voted to allow all complaints against them, including abuses of expenses, to be kept secret. Within hours, details of the MPS being probed over misconduct were deleted from Parliament’s website. All this apparently to avoid trial by the media.
The Sir Cliff Richard judgment introduced a new legal principle: that a person under investigation by the police should not normally be named. Much has been said about the implications for individuals who are being investigated, but the new rules could also mean less scrutiny of the investigations themselves: secrecy by another means.
The authorities, meanwhile, have been slow to share basic details about the Novichok case, including the extent of the risk to public health. And there was outrage earlier this year over the early release of the rapist John Worboys: the Parole Board’s reasoning for allowing his release was kept under wraps. The decision was only overturned after Worboys’s victims found out about it in the media and crowdfunded a legal challenge.
Is secrecy becoming a British disease? The vast sums of taxpayers’ money spent contesting freedom of information requests against public bodies, as well as the low priority lent to opening up official information, blamed on poor resources, say it all.
It wasn’t always this way. The Victorians considered institutional secrecy an abomination; they passed the Public Record Office Act, declaring such openness crucial to democracy. But they quickly regretted this when democracy let the “riff-raff ” in: soon the masses were reading newspapers and the civil service rank-and-file swelled with the reviled lower middle classes.
The Official Secrets Act followed. So did the blooming of a need-toknow-basis culture, an us-versusthem approach to the public, and an intoxication with the mystique and elite magic of government. Ironically, the Government’s appetite for quantifying, monitoring and measuring has made attitudes to openness worse – “truth” has become “data”, and data are “sensitive”, no matter how trivial.
The risks are grave. Scandals may never be brought to popular attention. Public bodies will also slip further into the shadows: there will be little scrutiny of their conduct. When they make mistakes, we will not know. While citizens fill out invasive forms and trade personal details for online services, the establishment erects barbed wire around its “Confidentiality Island”. If we want a society that protects individual, not just institutional, privacy, we must challenge this in stronger terms.