Digital Understanding

Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve (CB)]

My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lady Lane-Fox. This is a really important topic, and it is right to have this debate before we get anywhere near the Bill that seeks to reform the data protection system.

Who could be opposed to improving digital literacy? Like financial, political or emotional literacy, it is surely of great practical and human importance. No doubt one of the shortcomings of our present situation is that all too many of us are not sufficiently digitally literate. Many of us are part of a generation of digital autodidacts, and both our understanding and our know-how are too often patchy.

However, there are great obstacles to improvement in digital literacy while the underlying rules and conventions of the digital world are so obscure. I do not mean merely that the technical protocols of the digital world are unclear, although few are likely to understand them. I mean that the basic legal, regulatory and cultural standards of the online world remain obscure. Perhaps an analogy with the world of print in its early days will show this. In its early days, printing was initially a deeply disruptive new technology. Today our ability to assess the printed word is supported by a framework of laws and conventions; we can distinguish between authors, printers and publishers; publishers must be identifiable and are subject to laws that bear on defamation or breaches of copyright; and there are sanctions for plagiarism and passing off. There is a huge list of further laws and regulations that bear on the printed word. We can secure good standards of written communication only because we have reasonably clear legal, regulatory and cultural frameworks in place—there are common standards. At present, matters are not comparable in the online world. Digital literacy is therefore not enough to offer adequate protection or empowerment even to those who make an effort to become more digitally literate. It would be naive to expect individual digital literacy to offer adequate certainty or protection to those using digital technologies.

There are still cyber romantics to be found who believe that no legislation or regulation should restrain the online world. However, I think that picture is remote from daily life. Of course we need to preserve freedom of expression online, as offline—but online, as offline, the aim has to be qualified by measures that secure other rights of the person. Freedom of expression, online as offline, is a qualified right. The real problem is not that standards are not needed but that extraterritoriality is an everyday reality of the digital world, and all standards will need to be established by co-operation between the powers of that world and those of the world of states. They cannot be secured by state legislation alone, and this will not be easy. Agreement on the technical standards is one matter, but the wider systemic standards needed for a digital civilisation cannot be secured while there are vast rewards for breaching them.

To cast the burden of improvement entirely on individuals by requiring them to improve their digital literacy would be to overlook where the deeper need for change lies. I suggest that Parliament needs to start to address the deeper issues of securing legislation that supports standards in the digital world. That will not be done by some tweaks in the data protection laws; indeed, I suspect that revising that failing approach to the digital world will not lead us very far.