Data Protection and Digital Information Bill

Debate between Viscount Younger of Leckie and Baroness Kidron

Committee stage
Wednesday 24th April 2024 Grand Committee

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

That is one of the questions that I can now answer. The power will allow this, in so far as it pertains to helping the Secretary of State establish whether the benefits are being paid properly, as with paragraph 1(2) of new Schedule 3B. Rules around living together are relevant only to some benefits. That is a very short answer, but I could expand on it.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

May I add to the very long letter? I have been sitting here worrying about this idea that one of the “signals” will be excess capital and then there are matching accounts. If the matching account has more capital—for example, the person who has a connected account is breaking the £16,000 or £6,000—does that signal trigger some sort of investigation?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

That is a very fair question, and I hope that I understand it correctly. I can say that the limit for the DWP is that it can gain only from what the third party produces. Whatever goes on behind the doors of the third party is for them and not us. Whether there is a related account and how best to operate is a matter for the bank to decide. We may therefore end up getting very limited information, in terms of the limits of our powers. I hope that helps, but I will add some more detail in the letter.

Data Protection and Digital Information Bill

Debate between Viscount Younger of Leckie and Baroness Kidron

Committee stage
Monday 22nd April 2024 Grand Committee

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

I have a response to the question from the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, about signals. The signal is where the criteria or rules for benefit eligibility appear not to be met, and Parliament will have agreed those rules.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, the Committee will be grateful to hear, I hope, that I will not try to capture such a rich conversation. I thank the Minister for his careful listening and consideration. I will read carefully what was said at the Dispatch Box and what is about to be said during our discussion on the next two groupings because, without seeing all that in the round, I cannot truthfully say whether the questions asked by noble Lords have been answered.

I share a little of the concern that I can see agitating the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, about the words “signals”, “criteria” and “codes”, which are not promised in the Bill but are suddenly appearing. Indeed, the Minister will remember that, in a private meeting, we talked about how those criteria might be gamed and, therefore, how detailed they could possibly be. There may still be some differences of opinion, and possibly differences of practice, that need to be worked out.

Of course, for now, I will not press my opposition to Clause 128 standing part. I welcome further conversation between now and Report but, I have to say, I lost count of the number of times noble Lords have said “proportionate” in this debate and how many times the issues of scope, sweeping powers and so on were stated by some very expert people—both in and outside of this Room, not simply noble Lords.

The noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, mentioned a pilot but I seem to remember that some of the outcomes on equality in that pilot got lost in translation. Perhaps it would be good to find out exactly what the pilot did and did not reveal—that is, not just the things that the department would like to reveal but some of the things that were not tested.

I do not doubt the personal integrity of the Minister in the slightest but I am unsure about the idea that the “test and learn” approach has no boundaries around it in the Bill. It is like saying, “Trust us. We test and learn, and all those powers exist”. With that, I will withdraw my stand part notice on Clause 128, but we have quite a lot of questions still to answer in our discussions on the next group of amendments and beyond.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

The Government do wish to have that power. I should make it clear that an appointee could be a claimant as well, so there is a dual issue. It is important that we retain that power, to be sure that we cover the whole ground. But I will reflect on the noble Baroness’s point.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

There were a number of questions on the other group that related specifically to people’s willingness to take these roles on and what the unintended consequence of putting appointees and carers in this position might be for the DWP, with people saying, “Actually, not me, then”.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

The noble Baroness makes a very good point. I may be able to give her further reassurances in a letter because, on the one hand, we do want the power to be able to cover the ground. On the other hand, there are necessary protections that we must put in place. So further reassurances probably need to be given. There is that balance to be struck, but I hope I can continue to do that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

I will finish this answer, if I may. The DWP personal information charter lists banks and financial institutions, and other parties, among the parties with which DWP may share data and from which we may receive data. It also lists checking accuracy and preventing and detecting fraud among the purposes for which we may share or receive information.

A claimant will not be notified if their account details have been returned to DWP by a third party as that could alert fraudsters to the criteria, enabling them to evade detection—I think that is a valid point—but they will be notified if a DWP agent determines that a review is required as a result of the information provided by the third party. That notification will be done through the business-as-usual processes.

Moving on to defining working-age payments in legislation, which relates to the final amendment in this group, Amendment 235, which was tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, it would require the Government to specify in regulations the working-age benefits with which this power could be used. As she demonstrated, there is a wide range of benefits and therefore potential avenues for fraudsters to seek or exploit or for error to creep in. That is why it is important that the power enables the department to respond proactively as new fraud risks emerge.

That said, as the noble Baroness knows, the power will not be exercisable in all the benefits she listed—I took note of her long list—such as child benefit, which we have just mentioned, because the legislation is drafted in such a way that it could reasonably be exercised in relation to benefits for which the Secretary of State is responsible. I reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, and the Committee that in the first instance, we plan to use this with universal credit, employment and support allowance—ESA, pension credit and housing benefit. That is the way forward.

There may be a number of questions that I have not addressed, but I hope that I have continued to make the case for why this measure is so important and our aim to tackle fraud and error. I continue to make the case that it is proportionate and that proportionate safeguards are in place. With that, I hope the noble Baroness will agree to withdraw her amendment.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

Will people with power of attorney over the account of someone who receives a benefit also be caught up in all this? That is another vulnerable group, so this could be extensive and quite worrying. Secondly, I am concerned by the Minister’s answers on this group. They have made me feel somewhat more strongly than I did when giving my response on the previous group, so I feel I should put that on the record.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

That is understood. I know that I need to provide further reassurances. Attorneys are included for the reasons that I set out for appointees.

Trade Bill

Debate between Viscount Younger of Leckie and Baroness Kidron

Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 1st October 2020 Grand Committee

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

I believe I should respond to the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, if I may. The noble Lord makes a very fair point. It is fair to say that this is, just by dint of the coincidence of timing, tied up with all the work we are doing on the online harms White Paper. He will know that more detailed proposals on the regulations will be released alongside the interim voluntary codes. We need to look at this in tandem with what we are doing with free trade agreements. That is the answer I can give to him at the moment. Again, I will write to him with more details on this because it is a very important subject.

[Baroness Kidron (CB) [V]]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, for asking half of my question, but, as the Minister just said, it is tied up with online harms, we are tied up with trade—I think that is our collective anxiety, if you like. At what point do these things start impacting on each other in ways that are negative to children? The reason for having a standard going in is to make sure that children are not victims of what happens over the next months and so on. I want to make that point.

I have another question, if the Minister would be kind enough to answer. He mentioned, a couple of times, high standards of data protection, but does he mean the standards that we negotiated so long and so heavily during the passage of the DPA 2018? Are those the standards, and will those remain the standards, or are we talking about some other general high standards of data protection?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

To answer the second question from the noble Baroness, we could well be. I think I have said, in other respects, when we do finally leave the EU after the transition period, because we will have left the EU it will be up to us to look at our standards and raise them if we think that is right. On the way forward on online harms, which is very close to the heart of the noble Baroness, I reassure her that there is a lot of cross-departmental work going on here. Although this is DCMS-led, I reassure her, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Grimstone, that the DIT and other departments are working together on the way forward, bearing in mind the White Paper.

Social Media: News

Debate between Viscount Younger of Leckie and Baroness Kidron

Thursday 11th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to open a debate with such a broad range of informed speakers to follow. The question in front of us produces a number of interrelated and extremely important issues. I shall not attempt to cover them all but, instead, simply to set the scene for the detailed contributions that are to follow.

The interface between humans and information, be it visual, graphic, moving images, sound or text, is as long as our history. Our understanding of what to expect from those interactions is seen through the prism of technological innovations, cultural understanding and legal frameworks. It is encapsulated by the concepts of broadcast and publishing.

In this long history, the online service providers are an anomaly. The military and academic labs where the web originated were home to groups of skilled and active participants in an open web who saw the potential of decentralised networked computers as liberating and democratising. This was a physical network; these were academics and computer scientists bound by cables, not commerce. They did not consider themselves publishers, nor responsible for the content of others.

This view was almost immediately contested and overturned by early court judgments, but founders of the nascent platform successfully fought back. Citing the First Amendment, they insisted that their network of small networks had no controlling force and that the occasional misuse or obscenity was a small price to pay for a world with no gatekeepers.

The US “safe harbor” provisions in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act 1996 allowed online service providers to host, hold and transfer information with no liability for content. This principle was mirrored around the world, including in the e-commerce directive of 2000 that codified online service providers as “mere conduits”. This was Web 1.0.

Much of the internet’s utopian promise came true. But what nobody anticipated, including its founders, was how rapidly it would become highly commercialised. Ironically, the “safe harbor” provisions of Section 230, established to protect the common good from a few dissonant voices, now work against that common good. Those who publish online are incentivised to categorise themselves as online service providers in order to benefit from having no liability for content. It is a commercial advantage that has seen the exponential rise of a vanishingly small number of companies with unparalleled power, no collective oversight and unlimited piles of cash. This is Web 2.0, and it is in that context that we are having our debate.

Amazon has set up a movie studio. Facebook has earmarked $1 billion to commission original content this year. YouTube has fully equipped studios in eight countries. The Twitter Moments strand exists to,

“organize and present compelling content”.

Apple reviews every app submitted to its store,

“based on a set of technical, content, and design criteria”.

By any other frame of reference, this commissioning, editing and curating is for broadcasting or publishing.

In giving evidence to the Communications Committee on 19 December, representatives of Facebook and Google agreed that the vast proportion of their income comes from advertising—87% and 98% respectively. This advertising is embedded in, pops up in between and floats across the content that their users engage with. Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP, was clear what that means when he said that,

“Google, Facebook and others are media companies … They cannot masquerade as technology companies, particularly when they place advertisements”.

In common with publishers and broadcasters, these companies use editorial content as bait for advertising. They aggregate and spread the news, and provide data points and key words: behaviours that determine what is most important, how widely it should be viewed and by whom. In common with news publishers, they offer a curated view of what is going on in the world.

The Silicon Valley companies are content creators, aggregators, editors, information cataloguers, broadcasters and publishers. Indeed, severally and together they publish far more media than any other publisher in any other context—but, in claiming to be “mere conduits”, they are ducking the responsibilities that the rest of the media ecosystem is charged with.

The media is understood to be a matter of huge public and social interest because it affects common values, certain freedoms and individual rights. For the same set of reasons, it is subject to a complex matrix of regulatory and legal frameworks. But publishing and, by extension, broadcasting are not only legal and commercial constructs but cultural constructs with operating norms that reflect a long history of societal values and expectations, one of which is that those involved are responsible for content. They are responsible because, traditionally, they make large sums of money; they are responsible because they juggle those commercial interests with editorial interests; they are responsible because, within those editorial interests, they are expected to balance freedom of expression against the vulnerabilities, sensitivities and rights of the individual; and they are responsible because they are a controlling force over the veracity, availability and quality of information that is central to the outcome of our collective civic life.

In November, there was an outcry after a journalist reported that algorithms were auto-suggesting horrific videos to young users of YouTube Kids. Google’s response was not proactively to look at the content on its kids’ channel but to ask users to flag content, thereby leaving it to pre-schoolers to police the platform. Google did not dispute that the videos were disturbing or that the channel would be better off without them, but in its determination to uphold the fallacy of being a “mere conduit”, it was prepared to outsource its responsibilities to children as young as four and five.

Whatever the protestations, this is not a question of free speech; it is a question of money. The Google representative giving evidence to the Communications Committee said that to moderate all content on YouTube would take a workforce 180,000 people. Irrespective of the veracity of that statement, for a publisher or broadcaster, checking that your content is safe for children is not an optional extra; it is a price of doing business, a cost before profit. In October last year, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, was worth $700 billion.

I am not suggesting a return to a pre-tech era; nor am I advocating censorship. The media environment has never been, and hopefully will never be, home to a homogenous worldview. Nor should one romanticise its ability to “do the right thing”. It is a changing and fraught public space in which standards and taste are hotly contested and often crushingly low. But editorial standards and oversight, retraction, industry codes, statutory regulation, legal liability, and parliamentary oversight are no hazard to free speech. On the contrary—as information technologies have become ever more powerful, in democracies we demand that they uphold minimum standards precisely to protect free speech from powerful corporate and political interests.

The advances and possibilities of the networked world will always excite and will hopefully, in time, answer some of society’s greatest needs—but these companies occupy a legal space on a false premise, giving them a commercial advantage based on their ability to publish with impunity. That in turn undermines other media, threatens plurality and increasingly contributes to an insupportable cultural environment fuelled by a business model that trades attention for advertising revenue.

Sean Parker, co-founder of Facebook, said that when setting up Facebook the question on the table was:

“'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?”.


The answer was that,

“we … give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo … to get you to contribute more content … It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology”.

The hermetic spiral of content ends in ever more polarised views as users become blind to other perspectives, denuding us of a common space. The result is the abuse of public figures and the spread of bullying, hate and misogynist content at unparalleled levels. The ad revenue model fails to compensate content creators adequately and we have seen the wholesale collapse of other creative industries, the long-term cultural costs of which we have yet to calculate.

In the battle for our attention we have seen the weaponisation of information to political ends. While nothing new in itself, the commoditisation of political narratives and the lack of accountability has promoted a surge of fake news, locally and internationally funded, and with it comes a democratic deficit. This was frighteningly illustrated by the outcome of a Channel 4 survey last year in which fewer than 4% of people were able to correctly identify false news stories from true. The cost goes beyond the cultural and political. Our attention is secured by an eye-watering regime of data collection and with it a disturbing invasion of privacy and free will. The insights and potential for social and political control enabled by unfettered data profiling without redress or oversight undermine our human rights, our rights as citizens and the need for privacy in which to determine who we are as people.

The appropriation of our personal data is predicated on the use of intellectual property law. The very same companies that rigorously avoid editorial standards and regulatory responsibilities for content are happy to employ the protection of terms and conditions running to hundreds of pages that protect their commercial interests. The cherry picking of regulatory structures is at best hypocritical. Lionel Barber, editor of the FT, suggests that we “drop the pretence”. In a soon to be published paper from a group of industry insiders comes the suggestion of a new status of “online content provider”, with an accompanying online responsibility Bill and a new regulator. But perhaps, just as the arrival of networked computers led to a new legal status of “safe harbor”, the arrival of networked tech conglomerates requires an entirely new definition, based on the interrelation of society and technology.

Because, while big tech has yet to wake up to the societal responsibilities of its current businesses, the rest of us are hurtling towards Web 3.0: a fully networked world of smart homes and smart cities that will see the big five companies—seven if we include China—monopolise whole sectors and particular technologies, controlling both demand and supply, mediating all our behaviours and yet remaining beyond the jurisdiction of Governments.

We must never forget the extraordinary potential and social good in the technologies already invented and in use and in those still emerging, including publishing at a grand scale. However, while the internet is young, it is no longer young enough to be exempt from its adult responsibilities. This is no longer an industry in need of protection while it incubates. These are the most powerful companies in the world.

In finishing, I ask the Minister to tell the House whether the scope of the Government’s digital charter will include a review of the legal status of online service providers and an ethical framework for content. Perhaps he will also say whether he agrees with me that the same standards and responsibilities should apply to the media activities of online service providers in parity with other media players. Finally, what steps are the Government taking to create an international consensus for a global governance strategy for online service providers? I beg to move.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

My Lords, I may sound like a long-playing record, but in this debate we have just a few minutes to spare on timings. I ask that every Back-Bench speech concludes as the clock reaches four minutes, as otherwise the wind-up speeches may have to be shortened.