Digital Economy Bill (Sixth sitting)

Debate between Nigel Huddleston and Claire Perry

Committee Debate: 6th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 20th October 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Claire Perry]

I may have come up with a Daily Mirror headline. My point is that the whole debate about pornographic material has always ended in the cul-de-sac of freedom of speech. That is why we worked with internet service providers, saying, “Let parents choose. Let’s use the BBFC guidelines. They have years of experience defining this stuff based on algorithms.” It is not for the hon. Lady or me to decide what people should not be viewing; we quite properly have an independent agency that says, “This is appropriate; this is not.”

However, the hon. Lady has eloquently raised the point that for too long, we have treated the internet as a separate form of media. We accept in cinemas, whether or not the bus driver is working for them, that if a film is R18, we are pretty negligent if we take our kids to see it, but we are helped to see that. We do not let our kids wander into the cinema and watch the R18 stuff with nobody stopping them along the way, but for too long, that has been the situation with the internet. The hon. Lady has raised a good point about search engines. I can assure her that the world has changed significantly, certainly in the UK, although other jurisdictions may not have been so influenced.

[Nigel Huddleston]

I should probably declare that prior to becoming an MP, I worked at Google. Does my hon. Friend agree that this is where it becomes complex? A search engine, to use another analogy, is a bit like a library. The books are still on the shelves, but the search engine is like the library index: it can be removed and changed, but the content is still there. That is why we need to do much more than just removing things from the search engine: the content is still there, and people can find alternative ways to get to it. We must do much more.

[Claire Perry]

I defer to my hon. Friend’s knowledge. Of course we all agree that certain instances of countries taking things down are utterly abhorrent; I am thinking of information about human rights in China, or about female driving movements in Saudi Arabia. We do not want to be in the business of over-specifying what search engines can deliver. We have not even touched on Tor, the dark web or the US State Department-sponsored attempts to circumvent the public internet and set up some rather difficult places to access, which have increasingly been used for trafficking illegal material.

Digital Economy Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Nigel Huddleston and Claire Perry

Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 11th October 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Claire Perry]

Q I appreciate that point, but does either of you agree that there is a real asymmetry of concern between data which an individual may share with a public body and data which individuals share with a corporate body? One thing I am fascinated by, and it relates to so many provisions in the Bill, is that we knowingly or unknowingly give away rights to all kinds of information with every keystroke we make on the internet. We give huge chunks of personal information to corporate bodies which do not have the definition, as per clause 31, of improving the welfare of the individual, but are simply in it for profit. How would either of you help us to address that? Perhaps the Government—rightly, as an elected organisation—are being scrutinised about this, but my constituents are willy-nilly giving away vast chunks of their data, and in some cases giving away private data to very insecure storage facilities, almost without knowing it. It is frustrating for a Government who are trying to do the right thing to make digital government far more effective—as you did, Mike, during your time—to constantly be facing concerns and criticisms that ought properly to be applied to corporate bodies, but never are.

Mike Bracken: I completely understand your point about asymmetry and I agree with that. I would suggest that in corporate, public and private life it is a fair assumption that many people in the country are waking up to how their data have been used, how they have released that data and, increasingly, the repercussions of that, whether on social media, transactional data with a private company or, indeed, the public sector. There is a general awareness of and unease about some of the practices in all three of those sectors.

Having said that, the Government are held to a different account. Our members—we are a member-based organisation—hold the Co-op to a different account. We are the custodian of their data, and we are owned by our members. Many of the services we provide or help to provide to our members, such as wills, probate and funeral care, are deeply emotive at a certain time of life. These services often depend on Government data being in very good shape about place, location and identity. It is a fair correlation to draw that there should be a symmetry between how an organisation like us should be governed and managed, and the rules that should apply to public sector data. That is not to say that all the data regulations which apply to all corporations and trading organisations need to be exactly the same as those for the Government. That would be a political issue far beyond my position to comment on. The Co-op would look to see that the Government uphold the highest possible standards, so that our members can get the best possible use of that public data.

Jeni Tennison: Perhaps I can add a couple of things. Mike has made the point well that the Government need to act as a model for how to do data sharing well, and how to be open and transparent about handling people’s personal data. The Government are in a position of authority there. However, the other thing to bring up is that we have a mixed economy for the delivery of public services, including the private sector, charities and social enterprises. There should be some scrutiny over the way in which those organisations are handling personal data in the context of delivering those public services.

[Nigel Huddleston]

Q Do you believe that there is a lot of work to do in terms of clarity, in order to allay some of the fears about which data are being used here? I have had emails from constituents, and there is a perception that Excel spreadsheets will be floating around universities with personal financial data and personal health records. It is nothing like that, is it? It is aggregated and anonymised. What can we do, what can Government do and what can you do to help clarify the opportunity, move the debate on to those opportunities and allay some of those fears about data protection?

Jeni Tennison: I completely agree that there needs to be greater clarity about which data are being shared with whom, and why and how. You say that we are talking here about the transfer of aggregate and anonymised data, but that is not necessarily the case for some of the pieces of data sharing that are in the Bill. Some of it is the sharing of individual-level data, but it is not clear whether those are bulk Excel spreadsheets or through APIs. Those are the kinds of details that actually make a difference to how anybody might think about this trade-off between privacy and the public good.

Mike Bracken: Perhaps another way of thinking about that would be to question whether there needs to be sharing at all. As Jeni said, the sharing of data in Government has many different forms. Hopefully, many of those are secure and anonymised. I have doubts about our overall data-sharing operations, simply because Government is so distributed and there are so much data. Adding more sharing, without a clear landscape under which that is happening, seems to add more risk of privacy violation and more risk to security. Perhaps a way to think about it is access rather than sharing. Many Government Departments, and many organisations, are able to provide individual data points at point of request to people who they trust. You can query a dataset using an application programming interface rather than sharing an entire dataset with Departments. I suspect it is that willingness to share very large sets of data in different ways for the convenience of Government Departments and agencies that is the root cause of the unease around the data sharing part of the Bill.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Nigel Huddleston and Claire Perry

Thursday 30th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Huddleston]

Will the Minister provide an update on potential improvements to the north Cotswold line, which could provide a significant increase in tourist traffic beyond Oxford to Worcestershire and Herefordshire?

[Claire Perry]

My hon. Friend knows that the Department is working with Network Rail, Great Western Railway and other stakeholders to look at the whole business case and funding opportunities to really improve the London-Oxford-Worcester train services. The Department will publish its next rail investment strategy in summer 2017, which will set out the investment plans for 2019 to 2024.