Digital Understanding

Lord Sugar Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sugar (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, for introducing this debate today. I may stray a little from the general thrust of what she wanted to talk about, but it is very rare that we have the opportunity to discuss IT matters in this House.

I have been in the technology industry for over 50 years and I have obviously witnessed the massive growth of the internet. It did not exist 25 years ago and when it started, it came as a bit of a cultural shock to a lot of people. We did not trust it; we did not want to buy things online. Well, that is history. We have seen large companies such as Amazon, eBay and Google emerge in an industry that never before existed. Regrettably, all this is at the expense of a diminishing high street where independent retailers can no longer compete with online services. Looking ahead another 20 years, I simply wonder what the retail arena will look like—large or small.

Some of the public are aware that each and every time they engage in a transaction with the likes of Amazon or Google, they have been marked digitally. It is quite likely that the next time they go online, they will receive unsolicited messages relating to things they may have enquired about in the past. This is effectively what we might call the “big brother” syndrome—someone is overlooking your data and knows all about you. You have a profile somewhere in the cloud. Let me tell your Lordships, it is not going to go away. All we can do is be very careful and wary of what we do online. I am afraid that any discussion today about trying to stop this will be wasted. What I would say is very simple: “Get over it. It has happened”. Can we stop it? The answer is no: we are digitally marked and that is the end of it.

The internet is a wonderful tool, but it can also be used for dangerous purposes—terrorism, paedophilia, and so on. Internet search engine providers have a responsibility to assist the crime and security services in seeking out people who use the internet for the wrong reasons. Of course, if I were to ask the CEO of any of these companies, they would tell me that for sure they co-operate wholeheartedly with the security services. The reality is that they are commercial organisations. Their technical resources are used to find new ways to make money. The Government should insist, and have some form of auditing commitment to ensure that serious technical resource is allocated to seeking out the use of the internet for criminal or terrorism purposes. I suggest that GCHQ should be the auditing party and the Government should have the right to include an audit clause in the licences that allow providers to operate in our country. This will ensure that they are genuinely doing something about it.

I have seven grandchildren and on the very odd occasion that I am blessed with their coming to my home to have dinner, they sit around the table with their faces buried in their smartphones, to such an extent that I have banned the devices from the dining room. I deduce from this that something cannot be right. There is something wrong with young people in society today. I urge parents to take a stance to prevent their children spending too much time gazing into these devices. The internet is a wonderful thing, but it can also be a very dangerous tool.