Data Protection Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Lucas

Monday 13th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I rather hope that the Minister has not been able to persuade noble Lords opposite. Certainly, I have not felt myself persuaded. First, on the point about “solely”, in recruiting these days, when big companies need to reduce a couple of thousand applications to 100, the general practice is that you put everything into an automated process—you do not really know how it works—get a set of scores at the end and decide where the boundary lies according to how much time you have to interview people. Therefore, there is human intervention—of course there is. You are looking at the output and making the decision about who gets interviewed and who does not. That is a human decision, but it is based on the data coming out of the algorithm without understanding the algorithm. It is easy for an algorithm to be racist. I just googled “pictures of Europeans”. You get a page of black faces. Somewhere in the Google algorithm, a bit of compensation is going on. With a big algorithm like that, they have not checked what the result of that search would be, but it comes out that way. It has been equally possible to carry out searches, as at various times in the past, which were similarly off-beam with other groups in society.

When you compile an algorithm to work with applications, you start off, perhaps, by looking at, “Who succeeds in my company now? What are their characteristics?”. Then you go through and you say, “You are not allowed to look at whether the person is a man or a woman, or black or white”, but perhaps you are measuring other things that vary with those characteristics and which you have not noticed, or some combinations. An AI algorithm can be entirely unmappable. It is just a learning algorithm; there is no mental process that a human can track. It just learns from what is there. It says, “Give me a lot of data about your employees and how successful they are and I will find you people like that”.

At the end of the day, you need to be able to test these algorithms. The Minister may remember that I posed that challenge in a previous amendment to a previous Bill. I was told then that a report was coming out from the Royal Society that would look at how we should set about testing algorithms. I have not seen that report, but has the Minister seen it? Does he know when it is coming out or what lines of thinking the Royal Society is developing? We absolutely need something practical so that when I apply for a job and I think I have been hard done by, I have some way to do something about it. Somebody has to be able to test the algorithm. As a private individual, how do you get that done? How do you test a recruitment algorithm? Are you allowed to invent 100 fictitious characters to put through the system, or should the state take an interest in this and audit it?

We have made so much effort in my lifetime and we have got so much better at being equal—of course, we have a fair way to go—doing our best continually to make things better with regard to discrimination. It is therefore important that we do not allow ourselves to go backwards because we do not understand what is going on inside a computer. So absolutely, there has to be significant human involvement for it to be regarded as a human decision. Generally, where there is not, there has to be a way to get a human challenge—a proper human review—not just the response, “We are sure that the system worked right”. There has to be a way round which is not discriminatory, in which something is looked at to see whether it is working and whether it has gone right. We should not allow automation into bits of the system that affect the way we interact with each other in society. Therefore, it is important that we pursue this and I very much hope that noble Lords opposite will give us another chance to look at this area when we come to Report.

[Lord Clement-Jones]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who spoke in the debate. It has been wide-ranging but extremely interesting, as evidenced by the fact that at one point three members of the Artificial Intelligence Select Committee were speaking. That demonstrates that currently we live, eat and breathe artificial intelligence, algorithms and all matters related to them. It is a highly engaged committee. Of course, whatever I put forward from these Benches is not—yet—part of the recommendations of that committee, which, no doubt, will report in due course in March.

Data Protection Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Lucas

Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 13th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Clement-Jones]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that tour de force. This group is an extraordinary collection of different aspects such as research trusts and professional privilege. He even shed light on some opaque amendments to opaque parts of the Bill in dealing with Amendments 86A, 86B and 86C. The noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, was manful in his description of what his amendments were designed to do. I lost the plot fairly early on.

I thank the Minister particularly for his approach to the research aspect. However, we are back again to the recitals. I would be grateful if he could give us chapter and verse on which recitals he is relying on. He said that without the provisions of the Bill that we find unsatisfactory, research would be crippled. There is a view that he is relying on some fair stretching of the correct interpretation of the words “scientific” and “historical”, especially if it is to cover the kinds of things that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has been talking about. Many others are concerned about other forms of research, such as cyber research. There are so many other aspects. TechUK does not take up cudgels unless it is convinced that there is an underlying problem. This brings us back, again, to the question of recitals not being part of the Bill—

[Lord Lucas]

I support the noble Lord on this. Coming back to his earlier example, if you were told a sandwich was solely made of vegetable, the Minister is saying that that means it has not got much meat in it. This is Brussels language. I do not think it is the way in which our courts will interpret these words when we have sole control of them. If, as I am delighted to learn, we are going to implement our 2017 manifesto in its better bits, including Brexit, this is something we will have to face up to. This appears to be another occasion where “scientific” does not bear the weight the Bill is trying to put on it. It is not scientific research which is happening with the NPD. It is research, but it is not scientific.

[Lord Clement-Jones]

I agree with that. Again we are relying on the interpretation in whichever recital the Minister has in his briefing. It would be useful to have a letter from him on that score and a description of how it is going to be binding. How is that interpretation which he is praying in aid in the recitals going to be binding in future on our courts? The recitals are not part of the Bill. We probably talked about this on the first day.

Data Protection Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Lucas

Monday 30th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, I suspect that if you scratched half the Members of this House, they would have to declare an interest. I will just add a bit of non-Oxford variety as chair of the council of Queen Mary University of London. I express Front Bench support for my noble friend’s amendment and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Royall.

There is no doubt about the interaction of article 6 and the unfortunate inclusion of universities in the Freedom of Information Act definition, and there is no reason that I can see—we have heard about the alumni issues and the importance of fundraising to universities—why universities should not be put on all fours with charities, which can take advantage of the exemption in article 6. I very much hope that the Minister, who was nodding vigorously throughout most of the speeches, is prepared to state that he will come forward with an amendment, or accept this one, which would be gratefully received.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, perhaps I may say a word on behalf of the victims. I very much hope that we will be given the right to ask the college to cross our name off.

I very much enjoyed my time at Oxford. It took Oxford 37 years to cotton on to the idea that, having spent three years doing physics there, perhaps I was interested in physics and it might offer me something in continued involvement other than students being pestered into asking me for money twice a year. That is not a relationship; that is not a community; that is a one-way suck. It is a Dyson vacuum cleaner designed to hoover money in on the basis of creating some sort of obligation. It was a contract 40 years ago, for goodness’ sake: create something now or keep something going.

Fundamentally, I have very little sympathy with the idea—