The Internet and Privacy

Lord Dodds of Duncairn Excerpts

Thursday 28th October 2010 Westminster Hall

[Robert Halfon]

My right hon. Friend is a great defender of civil liberties and we are lucky to have him at the debate. I agree with him absolutely. Later in my remarks, I shall be able to give a more detailed answer to what he has suggested.

As Germany’s Interior Minister said in September 2010,

“If companies do not adopt satisfactory new rules, we will create more restrictive privacy laws. However, a voluntary code of sufficient strength and scope could make special regulations unnecessary, at least in part.”

In my meeting with Google to discuss Street View, it implied that blackening out houses in a street view would make things look “unseemly”. My answer to that is, so what? If aesthetics are sacrificed in the cause of liberty, that can only be a good thing. This is an important principle. Either our home is our castle or it is not. Google’s actions indicate an all-too-frivolous view of the rights of the individual against the advancement of internet technology.

However, as I stated in my opening remarks, we should not be worried just about Google. There are also reports that BT has been, allegedly, trawling people’s Facebook accounts to check for critical comments about the company. Again, that is totally out of order. There must be a limit to what these companies do. We may accept that, in the present day, most of these internet companies have good and honourable intentions, but we are setting a precedent. If we permit this invasion of privacy today, what might it be used for tomorrow?

A case in point is scraping, which I mentioned. Thanks to The Wall Street Journal, we now learn that the internet has given rise to thousands of data brokers and middlemen. They gather information from property records, social networking sites and telephone listings and by scraping data from websites where people post information about themselves. The point is not that those data are publicly available, but that they are being aggregated on a mass scale in a way that threatens individual privacy.

If we accept that civil liberties are being violated in the way that I have described, we must also acknowledge that something must be done about it. In some ways, what is going on is much more dangerous than state surveillance, because at least the citizen knows his rights and there is some possibility of legal redress. Also, it is possible to sack a Government if we are unhappy with them. We are familiar with the idea that there is a social contract between Government and citizen, but what is the social contract between a citizen and an internet corporation?

Street View affects everyone. Its impact is not limited to Google’s customers. When it comes to internet companies, the question of citizen rights is much murkier and less defined. That grey area has allowed firms such as Google to get away with what they have done. The reality is that a lot of privacy encroachment is going on that has yet to be uncovered.

Returning to the remarks by my right hon. Friend, I believe that there needs to be a robust inquiry, with teeth, into the role of the internet and its relationship to individual liberty.

[Mr Nigel Dodds (Belfast North) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this very important debate and on the eloquent way in which he is presenting his very important case. Does he agree that one of the frightening aspects of all of this is that we depend for information about what is happening and what the companies are up to on the companies themselves? As he pointed out, none of this would come to light unless the information was presented by the companies. Therefore, we do not know exactly what is going on. That is a key point, in terms of people knowing what is happening.

[Robert Halfon]

The right hon. Gentleman makes the extremely important point that in some ways we are becoming so dependent on the internet companies that that allows them to do what they are doing. He is exactly right.

I am not against private companies—I am a Conservative, after all. As I mentioned, I use Google a lot to run my parliamentary business, but this time it has gone too far. Indeed, there is a danger that one day, no one will have any privacy whatever—and this time the threat is not from the state.

I accept that, despite what I have described, there are no easy answers. When it comes to the advance of the internet, it seems that the rights and responsibilities are still unclear. I accept that it is very difficult for a nation state to deal with what is in effect a transnational company.