The outrage surrounding the activities of Cambridge Analytica coincides with the passage through parliament of the data protection bill. Taken together, these two developments frame the debate about privacy. Until now, the big data harvesting companies have approached their obligations to the people who supply their personal data much in the spirit of the Vogon demolition fleet in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, when Arthur Dent protests that the annihilation of the Earth has come without any warning: “But the plans were on display … on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.”
The new bill, modelled very closely on the EU’s corresponding regulation, promises to change all this. The idea is to establish very clearly that personal data can only be used for purposes for which informed consent has been given by the owners. The question – in the spirit of another Leopard – is whether everything will change so that everything can stay the same. How far can privacy be maintained in an economy that depends on the exploitation of personal data? By engaging with Facebook or Google at all, we give up far more information than we realise, in part because of the way in which data becomes more valuable the more of it is collected. Facebook, for example, can make a very good guess at a user’s sexual orientation on the basis of only four “likes”. This is possible only because it has billions of profiles to comb through for significant patterns which could not be discovered by examining them one by one. The user who gives up this information does not know they are doing so; it’s even possible that the company didn’t know it was collecting it at the time if the algorithms to extract it had not then been developed.
For many people, this implied bargain will be worth it. Facebook has vast networking effects on its side, so that the offer it makes might be paraphrased as “give us your data or you’ll never talk to your grandchildren, or your friends, again”. This is an offer some users can’t refuse. But the calculation changes when the purpose of data manipulation switches from commerce to politics. Democratic politics are far more than just another marketplace, and must be protected from the kind of techniques that are used to sell shoes or music. Failing to recognise this completely is the great weakness of the present bill. This is shown in two ways. The first is the refusal to properly bind the government by its own rules. The bill weakens an effective regulatory mechanism to ensure that different branches of the government do not share information we did not intend to be shared. The second, addressed by Labour’s Liam Byrne in these pages, is the failure to ensure that political advertisements can be held up to the light, so that they may be scrutinised properly. This is an essential amendment, which will do something to restore trust in a system that at present seems deserving of none.
