Data Protection Bill [Lords]

Debate between Damian Collins and Liam Byrne

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Wednesday 9th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Damian Collins]

I am grateful to the Minister for that further clarification.

Amendments 20 and 21 get to the heart of an issue that has been raised by a number of Members, which is the power of the Information Commissioner to act in data investigations. The Minister, the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) and others have referenced the Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal, which is a very good example of why these additional powers are needed. We raised that in the Select Committee with the Secretary of State. The Information Commissioner raised it with us and it was raised on the Floor of the House on Second Reading.

The ability to fine companies for being in breach of data rules is important, but what is most significant is that we get hold of the data needed by investigators, so that we understand who is doing what, how they are doing it and how wide-ranging this is. It is crucial that the Information Commissioner has the enforcement powers she needs to complete those investigations.

In the case of Cambridge Analytica, an information notice was issued by the Information Commissioner to that company to comply with requests for data and information. Not only did Cambridge Analytica not comply, but Cambridge Analytica and Facebook knew that. That information notice expired at 5 o’clock on the evening of the day when that deadline was set; it was the beginning of the week. Before the notice had expired and a warrant could even be applied for, Facebook had sent in its own lawyers and data experts to try to recover data that was relevant to the Information Commissioner’s request.

The Information Commissioner found out about that live on “Channel 4 News” and then effectively sent a cease and desist note to Facebook, telling it to withdraw its people. She might very well not have been made aware of what Facebook was doing that evening, and data vital for her investigation could have been taken out of her grasp by parties to the investigation, which would have been completely wrong. Not only did that happen—thankfully, Facebook stood down—but a further five days expired before a warrant could be issued—before the right judge in the right court had the time to grant the warrant to enable her to complete her work. We live in a fast-moving world, and data is the fuel of that fast-moving world, so we cannot have 19th or even 20th-century legal responses. We must give our investigatory authorities the powers they need to be effective, which means seizing data on demand, without notice, as part of an investigation, and having the ability to see how data is used in the workplace or wider environment.

The Government are bringing forward amendments, which I think have the support of the House, that will give us one of the most effective enforcement regimes in the world. They will give us the power to do something we have not been able to do before, which is to go behind the curtain to see what tech companies, even major tech companies, are doing and make sure they comply with our data rules and regulations. Without that or an effective power to inspect, we would largely be in the position of having to take their word for it when they said they were complying with the GDPR. Particularly with companies such as Facebook that run closed systems—they have closed algorithms and their data is not open in any way—there are very good commercial reasons for doing so, but there are also consumer safety reasons. We must have the power to go in and check what they are doing, so the amendments are absolutely vital.

There are further concerns. The shadow Minister, the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill, was right to raise concerns about honesty and transparency in political advertising. Both the Information Commissioner and the Electoral Commission are examining the use of data in politics, as well as looking at who places the ads. It is already a breach of the law in the UK, as it is in other countries, for people outside our jurisdiction to run political advertising during election campaigns in this country.

In the case of Facebook, it is unacceptable that its ad check teams have not spotted such advertising and stopped it happening when someone is breaking the law. If this were about the financial services sector, we would not let a company say, “Well, we thought someone was breaking the law, but we weren’t told to do anything about it, so we didn’t”. We would expect such a company to spot it and to take effective action. We need to see a lot more progress on this, particularly in relation to the placement of micro-targeting ads and dark ads. The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising has called for a moratorium on the micro-targeting of political ads, which may be seen only by the person who receives an ad and the person who places it.

When the chief technology officer of Facebook, Mike Schroepfer, gave evidence to the Select Committee, I asked him whether, if someone set up a Facebook page to run ads during a campaign and micro-targeted individual voters before taking down the page at the end of the campaign and destroying the adverts, Facebook would have any record that that advertising had ever run, he said that he did not know. We have written to him and Mark Zuckerberg saying that we need to know, because unless we know, a bad actor could run ads in huge volumes, investing a huge amount of money in breach of electoral law, and if they did not declare it, there would be no record of that advertising ever having been placed.

[Liam Byrne]

The Chair of the Select Committee is doing a brilliant job with his investigation, but the argument must stretch further than simply political advertising. For example, when Voter Consultancy Ltd ran attack ads against Conservative Members, accusing some of them of being Brexit mutineers, it was running an imprint for a company that was actually filing dormant accounts at Companies House. There are real questions not just about political ads in the narrow traditional sense, but about how to get to the bottom of who is literally writing the cheques.

[Damian Collins]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right and that throws up two really important points.

The first point is that the Information Commissioner is also currently investigating this, which links to the right hon. Gentleman’s point about where the money comes from and who the data controllers are in these campaigns. Although Facebook is saying that it will in future change its guidelines so that people running political ads must have their identity and location verified, we know that it is very easy for bad actors to fake those things. It would be pretty easy for anyone in the House to set up a Facebook page or account using a dummy email address they have created that is not linked to a real person, but is a fake account. This is not necessarily as robust as it seems, so we need to know who is running these ads and what their motivation is for doing so.

Secondly, the Information Commissioner is also looking at the holding of political data. It is already an offence for people to harvest and collect data about people’s political opinions or to target them using it without their consent, and it is an offence for organisations that are not registered political parties even to hold such data. If political consultancies are scraping data off social media sites such as Facebook, combining it with other data that helps them to target voters and micro-targeting them with messaging during a political campaign or at any time, there is a question as to whether that is legal now, let alone under the protection of GDPR.

As a country and a society, we have been on a journey over the past few months and we now understand much more readily how much data is collected about us, how that data is used and how vulnerable that data can be to bad actors. Many Facebook users would not have understood that Facebook not only keeps information about what they do on Facebook, but gathers evidence about what non-Facebook users do on the internet and about what Facebook users do on other sites around the internet. It cannot even tell us what proportion of internet sites around the world it gathers such data from. Developers who create games and tools that people use on Facebook harvest data about those users, and it is then largely outside the control of Facebook and there is little it can do to monitor what happens to it. It can end up in the hands of a discredited and disgraced company like Cambridge Analytica.

These are serious issues. The Bill goes a long way towards providing the sort of enforcement powers we need to act against the bad actors, but they will not stop and neither will we. No doubt there will be further challenges in the future that will require a response from this House.

Russian Interference in UK Politics

Debate between Damian Collins and Liam Byrne

Thursday 21st December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Damian Collins]

My hon. Friend is exactly right. It must be able to understand how to target users with information based on what it thinks they are interested in and where that information is coming from. It could conduct its own preliminary research to look for the characteristics of fake accounts and disinformation accounts linked to Russian agencies that are based on its platform. At the moment, it is refusing to do that.

[Liam Byrne]

Facebook’s last quarterly profits were nearly $4 billion. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it could afford to conduct the research if the will were there to do so?

[Damian Collins]

I absolutely agree. I noticed on a recent investor call that Mark Zuckerberg warned Facebook investors that dealing with these issues would have a direct impact on the bottom line. I am glad that he said that, but I would like to see him using that money. I do not see any evidence of the company putting resource into trying to tackle this issue.

At the moment, Facebook’s position in the UK is that it was only responding to questions put to it by the Electoral Commission. That has a much narrower focus because of the Electoral Commission’s exact remit. Facebook is not answering questions put to it by the Select Committee asking for more evidence of Russian-linked activity across the site, including in pages, group accounts and profiles, not just restricted to paid-for advertising. We have a right to receive information from Facebook, and it could conduct such research. It proactively conducted its own research looking at the activity of fake accounts during the French presidential election. That led to the deletion of more than 30,000 accounts, pages and profiles. Facebook did that itself. If it can do it in France, it can do it in the UK too, but currently it will not.

If Facebook’s position is that it will respond only to official intelligence directing it towards fake activity, then we need to be working to do that too. Our intelligence services need to be on the lookout, if that is the only trigger open to us to get Facebook to act.