Digital Economy Bill

Debate between Earl of Erroll and Lord Clement-Jones

Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 8th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for putting down this amendment. Indeed, this amendment has many good aspects to it, but I will adopt a phrase which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, used the other day, which is, “It doesn’t go nearly far enough”. It really highlights—and I declare an interest as the co-chair of the new All-Party Parliamentary Group on Artificial Intelligence—some of the issues that this Bill simply does not deal with. This does need huge consideration: all the ethics involved not only with artificial intelligence, but with the internet of things and the great many regulatory issues which spring from the new technologies. Algorithms are a part of it, of course they are, but we need further consideration.

I agree with those who have said that perhaps Ofcom is not necessarily the best regulator for this—I do not know—and it may be that we need to construct a purpose-built regulator for the world of artificial intelligence and the internet of things in ethical terms. I am not quite sure that Ofcom has got the necessary tools in terms of the ethics aspect of it.

I am very much in spirit with the noble Lord and I am delighted that he has raised it, but we are at the very beginning of a really important debate on a lot of these areas. The essence of all this is trust. We had a continuous debate through Part 5 about the government sharing of data. This is about the private sector and its use of a lot of our data and the way it sorts them and places them in the search engines. Trust is the overwhelming issue of our age, and we are not there yet. If we are going to reassure people who want to use these new technologies, we really do need to come up with a proper regulatory system. I do not think that this new clause quite provides it.

[The Earl of Erroll]

Before the noble Lord sits down, may I just ask him: is it not dangerous to make perfection the enemy of better? In other words, the amendment may not be perfect, but it is moving in the right direction, and to say, “Do nothing”, because it is not perfect is surely very unwise, given all the other stuff that he has said.

[Lord Clement-Jones]

My Lords, I know that the noble Earl himself is perfect in almost every way, so I would very much hesitate to argue with him. Still, I feel we need something rather broader than this proposal would provide.

Digital Economy Bill

Debate between Earl of Erroll and Lord Clement-Jones

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Thursday 2nd February 2017 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll]

Absolutely; I know what the noble Lord means. I simply meant that this is not necessarily an ID application—except, maybe, to identify yourself to the site which then gives your attribute to the other website.

I am thoroughly in favour of the amendment, and so is the industry. We hope to publish a standard on this in the not-too-distant future, which may help the regulator determine who is a fit and proper person to carry it out.

There is just one other thing I want to say. Once you have done your age verification and then go on to the website, if you then choose to subscribe, and give it your credit card number and everything else, that is up to you. I hope and trust that the sites—I know that they are pretty careful about this—will encrypt properly and guard the information with their lives, if not yours.

[Lord Clement-Jones]

I do not want to overload the Front-Bench contributions from this side, or to turn this into a mutual admiration society, but I want to say that the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, has played a blinder in educating many of us in this House about the possibilities and the technologies being developed on anonymised age verification. As the Minister probably knows, we had a very useful session with many of those developing new apps for this precise purpose. Yoti was one, VeriMe was another—one could go on. There are different types of age verification, which can be chosen by the consumer. The most recent, which is now virtually available for general use, is Yoti, which the noble Earl mentioned. These methods are now available for use; this is not a question of pie in the sky, or of things not being available for a year or so. That makes the amendment highly practical, and, as my noble friend said, it is absolutely essential for the protection of personal privacy.