Big Data and the need for a digital rights Bill
To unleash Britain’s tech potential and protect consumers, we need a Bill of Digital Rights
“Big Data” will be the oil of the 21st century, writes Telegraph columnist Allister Heath, unlocking vast economic potential, but only if we get our regulation right. “A Bill of Digital Rights is needed to protect consumers and give people control over their information,” he writes. “Failure to ensure a new deal between tech firms and the public will have untold consequences. But if done well, the UK will be able to ride Big Data into a future of prosperity and innovation.”
Some revolutions are the outcome of intense, heated debate, or sudden, abrupt shifts in power; they represent obvious, spectacular turning points in human history. Others just sneak up on us: we know something important is going on, but don’t realise just how dramatically the world has already changed until it is almost too late.
“Big data”, a perfect example of the latter, is going to be a fantastic boon. Compiled from the digital trail left by web searches, credit card payments and smartphones, it will transform productivity and consumer choice, and kick-start Western economies that have been in a rut for the best part of a decade. It will drive dramatic improvements in healthcare, education and mobility, and allow us to live longer and better lives. But, like all great breakthroughs, it comes with immense dangers.
If not managed carefully, the evermore sophisticated mapping of every last piece of our personal information will herald not just the death of privacy but also allow rogues to destroy lives by falsifying data. It will facilitate cyber-terrorism and, in some parts of the world, the persecution of minorities and dissidents. Even in the most liberal of democracies, it will hand vast powers to officials. It will reset the relationship between consumers and very large US tech businesses, some of which are now openly embracing political activism.
This requires a major shift in legal thinking akin to the strengthening of intellectual property rights prior to and during the Industrial Revolution, or the emergence of new forms of international law in the 20th century. We need to reach a new political settlement, perhaps in the form of a Bill of Digital Rights. This effort will need to go much farther than cracking down on criminal material, however much that is also needed.
At the very least, we will need clearly to establish property rights in data and all categories of personal information: ideally, individuals should retain ownership of their information, and perhaps even of their social connections, and should have the right to delete some or all. Their relationship with big companies such as Facebook and Google should be purely transactional and time-limited: data are temporarily shared, in return for something (in this case, a free service). It may be that we could even move to a world where customers are free to move all of their data, emails and social connections – their entire digital identities – to a different company whenever they wish to do so, just like we can now port our phone number from one company to the next. There will also need to be opt-outs: individuals should have the right to anonymity as long as they understand that this means no longer enjoying access to free services or tailored commercial offers.
The launch this week of a new Apple iphone that relies on facial-recognition technology, rather than a PIN or fingerprint, to unlock the device, was a seminal moment. Apple is a responsible company that genuinely believes in the privacy of its users: it will store people’s faces locally on its smartphones, in the most secure way possible.
But we are now only a few years away from the day when facial recognition technology will be sufficiently advanced that, whenever we walk down a street, networks of CCTV cameras, public as well as private, will immediately recognise us. Databases of people’s faces will be created and used for commercial as well as law and order purposes.
We can already be tracked from our smartphones, of course, and willingly give up our location and vast amounts of other information. But at some point, perhaps after a major cyber-hack, the public will begin to rebel, as has already happened in Germany and other countries.
Yet a wholesale rejection of the data society would be catastrophic: it would rob the economy of its next major engine, and make just about every new breakthrough impossible to achieve. We need entrepreneurs to be able to mine and use data in all sorts of new ways, and Britain’s scientific heritage and our strengths in retail, media, advertising and fintech (financial technologies) mean that our firms are likely to benefit more than most.
It turns out, in fact, that Britain was a pioneer in the new data economy.
In 1993, two years before the internet went mainstream, Tesco’s Sir Terry Leahy decided to investigate the idea of loyalty cards. The following year the company hired Clive Humby, a maths guru from Sheffield, after he demonstrated the power of the humble magnetic strip card. For the first time ever shoppers were no longer anonymous, and the cards delivered incredible levels of insight about individual customers, eventually allowing them to be targeted with personalised discounts. Lord Maclaurin, the firm’s chairman, was stunned: “What scares me about this is that you know more about my customers after three months than I know after 30 years.”
Humby, a mathematician from Sheffield, and his wife Sheila Dunn made a fortune from their Dunnhumby business. “Data is the new oil,” Humby was the first to grasp. “It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used … it has to be broken down, analysed for it to have value,” he said in 2006, a year before the first iphone was released.
The modern digital economy is best understood as a massive extension of the original Tesco Clubcard idea, with dramatically better ways of analysing and connecting a far greater array of data points. Instead of just being able to match someone’s name and address to purchases in one shop, the holy grail is to discover everything about everybody, in real time, and to better understand how human beings think and choose. The next step is to combine this with artificial intelligence tools to provide a perfectly individualised commerce proposition: the right goods and services, before we even realise that we need them, at exactly the right price.
It’s a great idea, but one that requires a new deal between tech firms and the public for it to retain legitimacy and deliver to its full potential. The rush for oil triggered wars, coups and untold misery; it is imperative that the rush for the riches of Big Data be better managed. It is time for a national debate on technology, privacy and data, and some truly creative thinking from our greatest legal minds.