Data Protection and Digital Information Bill

Baroness Garden of Frognal Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 27th March 2024 Grand Committee

Clause 25, as amended, agreed.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

My Lords, this may be a convenient moment for the Committee to adjourn. Happy Easter, everyone.

Committee adjourned at 4.46 pm.

Data Protection and Digital Information Bill

Baroness Garden of Frognal Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th April 2024 Grand Committee

[Viscount Stansgate (Lab)]

My Lords, I find myself in a fortunate position: we have made progress fast enough to enable me to go from one end of the Room to the other and play a modest part in this debate. I do so because, at an earlier stage, I identified the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, and I very much wish to say a few words in support of them.

Reference has already been made to the briefing that we have had from CRISP. I pay tribute to the authors of that report—I do not need to read long chunks of it into the record—and am tempted to follow the noble Lord in referring to both of them. I sometimes wonder whether, had their report been officially available before the Government drafted the Bill, we would find ourselves in the position we are now in. I would like to think that that would have had an effect on the Government’s thinking.

When I first read about the Government’s intention to abolish the post of the Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner, I was concerned, but I am not technically adept to know enough about it in detail. I am grateful for the advice that I have had from CRISP and from Professor Michael Zander, a distinguished and eminent lawyer who is a Professor Emeritus at LSE. I am grateful to him for contacting me about this issue. I want to make a few points on his and its behalf.

In the short time available to me, this is the main thing I want to say. The Government argue that abolishing these joint roles will

“reduce duplication and simplify oversight of the police use of biometrics”.

Making that simpler and rationalising it is at the heart of the Government’s argument. It sounds as if this is merely a tidying-up exercise, but I believe that that is far from the case. It is fair to accept that the current arrangements for the oversight of public surveillance and biometric techniques are complex, but a report published on 30 October, to which noble Lords’ attention has already been drawn, makes a powerful case that what the Government intend to do will result in losses that are a great deal more significant than the problems caused by the complexity of the present arrangements. That is the paper’s argument.

The report’s authors, who produced a briefing for Members’ use today, have presented a mass of evidence and provided an impressively detailed analysis of the issues. The research underpinning the report includes a review of relevant literature, interviews with leading experts and regulators—

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

My Lords, there is a Division in the Chamber. There are two votes back to back so the Committee will just come back as and when.

Data Protection and Digital Information Bill

Baroness Garden of Frognal Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 22nd April 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 199, I will also speak to the other amendments in this group. In so doing, I declare an interest as the principal proprietor of the Good Schools Guide; we make a lot of use of cookies on our website.

I am completely in favour of what the Government are doing in this part of the Bill as an attempt to reduce cookie consent pollution. It is a tiresome system that we all go through at the moment. The fact that it is tiresome means that, most of the time, we just click on it automatically rather than going through to the details. In a way, it is self-defeating. What the Government are trying to do will very much improve the quality of people’s response to cookies and will make them more aware, in situations where they are asked for consent, that this is important.

However—this will be the request at the end of my speech—between Committee and Report, I would really like to sit down with any noble Lords who are interested and are representatives of the relevant industry to discuss how we should deal with cookies that relate to supporting advertisement delivery. A lot of the web relies on advertisements for the revenue to support itself. By and large, for a lot of sites that you are not asked to pay but from which you get a lot of value, that value is supported by advertising. As a website, if you are going to charge someone for delivering advertising, you have to be able to prove that the advertisement has been delivered and to tell them something about the person to whom you are delivering it. In this process, you are not interested in having individual information. What you want is collective information; you want to know that you have delivered 24,000 copies of this advertisement and know what the audience looks like. You absolutely do not want to end up with personal information.

Within that envelope—absolutely excluding the sorts of cookies that chase you around the internet saying, “Do you want a deckchair?”, just because you bought one two days ago—this is a vital part of the way the internet works at the moment. In Amendments 199 to 201, I suggest ways in which the clauses could be adapted to make sure that that use of cookies—as I say, it does not involve the sharing of personal information; it very much involves collective information—is allowed to continue uninterrupted.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

My apologies to the noble Lord but his microphone does not seem to be working. I wonder whether he could speak more clearly.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

I am sorry. I assumed that my microphone was on.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

It is but I do not think it is working. I do not know whether anybody else is having problems with it.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

Okay. It does not quite reach me up here; I could sit down if that would be helpful.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

No, carry on.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

I will try to line up with it better. Amendments 202 to 205 flag concerns with proposed new Regulation 6B, which sets out to remove cookie banners automatically when the technology is available. The concerns very much relate to that last phrase: “when the technology is available”. How will this work? How is it to be managed? There is only a thin layer of controls on the Government in the way that they will use these new powers; it is also unclear how this will affect consumers and advertisers. There could be some far-reaching effects here. We just do not know.

I am looking for, and hope the Government will agree to, wide consultation because, on something such as this, it is never true that everybody knows everything. You want to put the consultation out to a lot of different people with a lot of different experiences of how to use the net to make sure that what you are doing will have the sort of effects that you want. I want to see proper, thoroughgoing impact assessments, including of the impact on competition and on the economic health of participants in the net. I would like to see a real analysis of the readiness of the technology, not just an assumption that, because somebody likes it, it will work, but a real, critical look at whether the technology is actually up to what it is hoped it will do, and proper testing, so that, in giving the Government the carte blanche that they have asked for with these clauses, we do not end up letting ourselves in for a disaster.

As I said, most of all, I am looking for a meeting between now and Report, so that I can go through these things in detail, and we can really understand the Government’s position on these matters and, if necessary, discuss them further on Report. I beg to move.