The myth of the transparent organisation.

Posted on June 11, 2014 by lawrence serewicz
Accountability vs. Responsibility

Accountability vs. Responsibility (Photo credit: shareski)

We will hear that transparency is good for organisations and organisations will even tout their transparency. In many cases, the organisations believe what they are doing is transparent. They publish information on a regular basis that describes decisions, financial positions, and future strategies. In this, transparency is a means to an end for the corporation as it appears to be a good corporate citizen. Here we see the beginning of the problem. The organisation wants to appear to be transparent. The appearance becomes the goal rather than the reality. This has two consequences one external and the other is internal.

Transparency becomes reputation management

We can see the external consequences very simply. In the external realm, the organisation sees transparency as an issue that affects its reputation. Transparency must be managed like its reputation. The goal is not to be transparent but to appear transparent. The transparency will be managed. The organisation will publish what best suits its interests and its reputation. Such an approach is not surprising. Human nature is such that we want others to see us as we see ourselves. We want to control how others view us. Transparency means that someone else can potentially see the organisation as it is rather than as it appears to be. Transparency in this sense can become a form of accountability. It is hard to be accountable. For an organisation that focuses on its reputation, any transparency, except that filtered and managed for appearance and reputation, will threaten it. The transparency will make the organisation accountable in a way that it cannot control and will be resisted.

Vertical and horizontal transparency and accountability

The organisation sees transparency as a barrier to what it wants to do. One way to avoid the barrier is to claim it is already accountable. The problem though is that accountability can mean two things. The public will want vertical accountability and the organisation will want horizontal accountability. The term vertical accountability refers to the audience that holds the organisation to account. The audience is either the employees or to the public. By contrast, horizontal accountability has a different audience. The audience is peers such as the board or the regulators. The organisation does not exist and hold power, either corporate or political, to be held to account in ways that they cannot manage. Externally the organisation wants to be seen for what it appears to be rather than what it is. This brings us to the internal consequences.

Transparency is difficult when you are opaque to yourself.

To manage its reputation, an organisation will become opaque to itself. The organisation will control what is said by staff to align with its reputation. The control is usually informal or cultural. Take for instance the public sector. Some public sector organisations publish their corporate management team minutes and transparency information. For some organisations they will publish more than the minimum because that is their culture. For others, they will publish the minimum and present it to suit their interests. If something is a sensitive topic, such as spending on consultants, the term consultants will be replaced with something less noticeable like professional services. The organisation considers itself transparent and accountable. Such a scenario may seem farfetched. Perhaps it is. Yet, it reflects a dysfunctional culture. The culture resists transparency. It may want to be praised for being open and transparent, but it resists accountability. Where this occurs, we often see a perception gap between senior managers, middle managers, and junior employees that creates perverse outcomes.

The perception gap creates perverse incentives.

The perception gap that creates perverse outcomes occurs in the following way. Senior manages agree a plan to deliver a widget in 10 days. They want to beat the target of 20 days. They tell the middle managers this without consulting them. They are consulted by being told the plan. The senior managers expect them to do as they are told. If the widget will be delivered in 10 days, then it must be delivered in 10 days. It is for the middle manager to work out the details. The middle manager, in turn, then has to deliver the 10 days target against their other work. To meet the target, frontline team do perverse things.  They send a lower quality good or they massage the figures. They will count delivery as the day shipped. The senior managers are pleased because they see the 10 day target being met. The frontline staffs become disillusioned because they see the senior managers are out of touch. The middle managers lose respect because they cannot convince the senior managers the target is wrong and they allow perverse outcomes so that they can show they can meet the targets.

Internal culture works to maintain appearances

The internal problem comes when the gap between appearance and reality becomes too great to manage. The desire to manage the external reputation, rather than let it reflect the reality, infects the internal culture. The same perception-perversion gap will occur. The issue is not the gap between appearance and reality but the size of that gap. As the gap increases the internal culture becomes dysfunctional. In an extreme form, we can see this in the failure of Enron where the image of the executive was maintained until it could not be maintained anymore and the market was able to see the company for the shell that it was. We may consider these aberrations, yet, the underlying issue is that companies resist transparency that will show this gap and they are trained to resist it.

Do what is best for the company hides the problems

In particular the training to resist the transparency can be seen in things like single loop learning or blame avoidance. When a problem arises, the managers will act quickly to solve the problem. If the problem persists, and threatens the appearance, “we are a good company at x”, then the manager faces a choice. They have to explain a problem that threatens to undermine the reputation, the appearance, which the organisation is defending. Most employees want to be good employees and do what is good for the company. As a result, they may report the problem in such a way as to avoid blame without explaining that the reputation is wrong. In this regard, they do what is best for the company, or rather the senior managers, protect or support the reputation, rather than explaining the reality. If a junior officer tries to do the right thing and describe the reality, their senior managers may be embarrassed or seek to avoid blame by claiming that the junior officer “does not have all the details or the wider perspective on the issue”. When this occurs, the junior employee sees that it is better to deliver only so much transparency that will be accepted by the senior managers.

Transparency if I am at risk, contain the crisis if the company is at risk

The culture changes so that the employees embrace transparency that affects them or harms them. If it affects the organisation, the goal is to “contain” the crisis and limit transparency. The organisation’s reputation becomes the overriding goal for employee. For organisations, as for governments, silence protects them. They will resist anything that breaks that silence especially if they cannot manage it. The organisations and its executives want transparency that they can manage. They want to decide how they are seen. The goal is to keep others from knowing the organisation as it is rather than as it appears. The transparent organisation while well intentioned becomes a practice in reputation management rather than a change in culture or behaviour.

What is to be done to avoid the problem?

First, the organisation needs to work at being transparent to itself. This means it must have good internal communication so that bad news or news that contradicts the public reputation can be reported upwards.

Second, the organisation must align its reputation with its reality. If it is constantly seeking awards, the issue is whether it is in the business of winning awards or delivering a superior product. The first is about reputation management the second is about excellence.

Third, the organisations need to focus on the outcomes that are best for the company not just for senior managers. This is often the hardest part as senior managers rarely like to become powerful to be held to account.

 

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How to write transparent investigation reports

Posted on June 5, 2014 by lawrence serewicz
Students photographing evidence in SUNY Canton...

Students photographing evidence in SUNY Canton’s Criminal Investigation program (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the age of Freedom of Information, public sector organisations, including the police, have to be prepared to respond to FOI requests for how they conduct investigations.  For some organisations and some situations, the investigation report is made public such as in a public inquiry.[1] In many cases, the request will relate to an issue of public interest, but in other cases, such as internal disciplinary issues, the case will not attract the public interest. In those cases, the FOIA will be less likely to apply because personal data (s.40 (2) in the UK, will limit the personal data that can be disclosed. However, in cases where the public interest is high, the organisation may have to disclose some if not most its investigation report either under FOIA or as part of another regulatory requirement such as an Ombudsman investigation.[2] With that requirement in mind, it is a good idea to develop an investigation procedure and guidance that will reflect the need for transparency after the investigation is completed. The benefits are twofold. First, you are likely to have a more robust investigation. Second you are likely to be ready to be more transparent with your own organisation and, most importantly should the demand arise, to the public or regulator.

If the organisation is not prepared for FOIA, the way it conducts an investigation can appear to be a cover-up because they fail to follow these 8 steps. In all cases, a balance must be struck between confidentiality, privacy, and the public interest. However, even if the investigation is not to be made public, the steps are important for the organisation to be transparent to itself within the legal confines of confidentiality.

First, draw up clear terms of reference for the investigation. You want the people doing the investigation and those being investigated, or those involved in the investigation, to understand what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how you are doing it. The same would be for a criminal investigation where the subject has to know the crime they are being charged with and what they are under investigation for having done. If you are investigating something by the organisation because of a public complaint, you will need to let the complainant know the terms of reference in principle, even if you cannot provide them all the details in case that may prejudice the investigation. If you don’t provide the terms of reference or the nature of the investigation, especially on a public complaint, you may create an expectation gap between what they think you are investigating and what you are investigating.

After the investigation is completed, or as part of the final report, the terms of reference should be shared with all people involved, with the FOIA caveats regarding confidentiality and prejudice to subsequent or ongoing investigations. In complaints about a service, rather than an individual, you are likely to have the terms of reference implicit in the complaint. If they are not, then it is important to let the complainant know what you are investigating. This is the first step to avoid the appearance of a cover-up. If the organisation does not keep a copy of the terms of reference or never has terms of reference, it can give the appearance of a less than robust approach to investigations. If the investigation is a simple complaint, then the complaint itself will be the terms of reference. In smaller organisations or on basic investigations, this will be the case. Anything involving more than two people will likely need a terms of reference to know what is being investigated and why as well as explaining the priority of interviews to the investigator. All of this is bearing in mind the critical point that during any investigation, the disclosure of information relating to the investigation is on a need to know.

Second, set up a list of questions, themes, or issues that will be explored to express the terms of reference.  The questions should be enough to set the question map rather than a definitive list. The themes or issues that need to be covered could be disclosed if the exact questions may reveal sources and methods that would prejudice an ongoing investigation or prejudice future investigations. The caveats here is if the investigation takes a number of iterations so that questions asked at the first round can influence the second round. As a mentor of mine once said “Questions breed questions”. As questions always lead to more questions so that one cannot determine all the possible issues before they emerge. At the same time, one would have to avoid disclosing any personal data, such as names of people to be interviewed or who has been interviewed if it would prejudice the interview. If a copy cannot be shared because interviews are still being conducted, they should be shared as soon as the interviews are completed and it is not prejudicial to an investigation. In some cases, such as a disciplinary or tribunal the questions may be shared as part of the tribunal process. If the questions are not transparent after the event, it can give the appearance that questions are already determined and the outcome is decided. In other words, you are only asking for what you expect to find. .

After the investigation, the questions may need to be disclosed as part of an FOIA request because the nature of the investigation, especially one in the public interest, would need to be shown to be robust. In a small investigation, or ones that relate to investigations that do not attract a high degree of public interest, the questions or issues can be included in the terms of reference.

Even though the questions can be included in the terms of reference, it is best that they are drawn up separately and informed by the terms of references rather than limited to the terms of reference. The caveat here is if the issue is a minor or small investigation.

Third, set up a timetable when the interview is scheduled to be completed. This does not have to be set out in stone, but it should be specific enough so that that the people know the overall timetable for the investigation. No one likes to be involved in an open ended investigation. Smaller investigations can have this set out clearly as the issue may be easy to resolve. If the organisation cannot give a schedule of when the investigation is likely to be completed, it is a sure sign it cannot plan and it would look like a cover up or a pre-determined outcome is in place. The timeline will help to keep the complainant informed and you can then update them at certain points or report that there is nothing to report if that is the case. This is especially important in complaints about a service.

Fourth, keep a list of the people interviewed and when they were interviewed. If the organisation cannot provide this list, after the investigation as required, it shows that it is not organised nor that the investigation is well structured. Again, the issue here is after the report or the investigation is completed as the FOIA request may ask to demonstrate that the appropriate people were interviewed. If an incident or a complaint involved an officer and they were not interviewed or relevant people were not interviewed, this could prejudice the investigation. If the investigation is not to be made public, the organisation still needs to know for its own transparency and accountability how the investigation was conducted and who was interviewed.

Fifth, include something from the interviews within the report. Otherwise it will appear that the report has not covered all the questions or involved the responses from all the people interviewed. If people are interviewed and they are not included in the final investigation report, that will need to be explained in the report. In some cases it may not be practical or wise to include the names of everyone interviewed especially if there are confidential sources. The issue here is the final report would need to tell the organisation what was found and what needs to be done.

After the investigation, a FOIA request may still require the organisation to withhold some of the report as it relates to personal data or confidential information. If the organisation is interviewing people but does not have a need to include them in the final report, there may be an appearance of a cover up or at a minimum poor organisation. This can be overcome by having a list that is used for the organisation and then redacted for the purpose of disclosure in the public domain.

Sixth, the investigation report should guide the reader from the terms of reference to the recommendations. The reader should be able to follow from the report’s terms of reference through the questions to the conclusions and on to the recommendations. A well written report, leads the reader step by step through this process. If the report does not follow the terms of reference or the recommendation does not fit the questions, then the report will raise more questions than it answers. Thus, a well structured report that is clear will demonstrate better transparency to the organisation and to the public.

Seventh, if the report has recommendations, there should be a follow up action plan that shows how those recommendations are to be addressed. For any investigation report there should be a second report outlining the action plan for the recommendations from the investigation. If this does not exist, the complainant will not be certain you are going to solve the problems that were identified. At the same time, they and others have no way to check that you have done what you have recommended or explained why you could not do what was recommended.

In a smaller investigation, this will not be needed because the investigations recommendations are likely to be the solution to the problem. In a larger organisation or on an issue involving many people, there should be a clear action plan that the organisation can monitor to make sure that it has completed what it promised to do.

Eighth, if at all possible share all of the above or most of the above with the person who made the complaint or raised the issue. At a bare minimum, this will help to avoid the appearance of a cover-up and it will demonstrate you have done what the complainant asked. In a basic customer complaint, you need to tell them what went wrong, why it went wrong, and what you have done to fix it. The complainant may not need to see all the interviews and the investigation, even though the organisation may need that for its own learning.

In more complex cases, if someone is a victim of a crime it would be strange not to tell the victim what the organisation found out and what it will do to make it right. This does not mean they receive the whole report or special access, but that it is best to let the victims know about the outcomes.  For example, once the disciplinary hearings are finished and the investigation report is no longer as confidential as the public interest has changed, then the organisation should consider disclosing the full report or as much as can be disclosed under the appropriate legislation. Again, this is driven by the public interest in the issue or the investigation. At a minimum, the organisation should be prepared to be transparent to the public and to itself.

Internally, the organisation needs to have a process to learn from each investigation with a learning outcomes circulated to all staff, if required, and more sensitive or more detailed information to those with a need to know. For example, if an organisation investigates a fraud case it will publicise that success without great detail for the public or general staff. However, it will likely circulate specific control improvements to those employees that have a need to know about the fraud and its consequences. The purpose of the investigation is to find the problem, fix it or assign blame if required for further criminal action; it should not be to avoid scrutiny or transparency. When the organisation shares information to learn from the investigation, it must still follow the duty of confidence to protect personal data from inappropriate or unauthorized disclosure.

Even if you do not end up sharing the information for legal reasons, you should share it internally so that the organisation can learn from the issue. In all cases a balance must be struck so that you do not disclose so much that you kill the patient but enough that the public, if a public interest issue, and the organisation learn from the incident.

The eight steps might sound like common sense, but many public sector organisations do not prepare their investigations for transparency. As a result, they store up problems because they are neither transparent to themselves or to the public. If they are unprepared for transparency, because they are opaque to themselves, their investigations can appear, even though it is unintended, to be a cover-up because they have not done these steps or have not prepared themselves with the possibility that they would have to disclose information relating to the investigation and its outcome. If an organisation does not follow these steps it will be a good indication that they are not a learning organisation. Most, if not all, of the points will be followed by organisations that want to learn from the complaint or the issue. If it is a small issue or complaint, most of the eight items will be covered by good customer service. In more complex cases, such as police or criminal investigations, the balance needs to be struck because the public interest is strong to maintain the integrity of the investigative process while demonstrating, if only to the regulator, that a robust investigation process works to satisfy the public interest in the process. At a minimum, the eight steps will at least ensure the organisation is transparent to itself even if it is not transparent to anyone else.

I would like to thank Donna Boehme of the Compliance Strategists for comments on an earlier version of this post published as 8 Steps to ensure your investigation does not appear to be a coverup. I wish to thank her for her time and her comments. They improved the post by pointing out some errors and omissions. Any remaining mistakes are my own. 

Compliance Strategists are a leading consulting firm based in the metropolitan New York area, specializing exclusively in compliance, ethics, risk and governance practice.   http://www.compliancestrategists.com/

 

[1] See for example Serious Case Reviews, when a child dies or a serious outcome occurs in a safeguarding situation, have to be published. They are published with some personal data removed and confidentiality protected as required. However, the point is that they are now published whereas they were not available to the public previously. http://www.familylawweek.co.uk/site.aspx?i=ed59995

On the issue of public inquires and royal commissions in the UK see the following http://www.parliament.uk/topics/Public-inquiries.htm as well as historical examples http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/webarchive/inquiries-inquests-royal-commissions.htm On the general issues of a public inquiry see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_inquiry

[2] See how the UK local government ombudsman approaches investigations. http://www.lgo.org.uk/guidance-inv/

 

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IAPP Privacy and Freedom: A review by Lawrence Serewicz (@lldzne)

Posted on June 5, 2014 by lawrence serewicz

Here is my review of Alan Westin’s book Privacy and Freedom. I would welcome your views on the review.
I would be particularly interested in what you think of the following thesis. The privacy professionals have failed to deliver on the promise of privacy as corporations show a disregard for privacy. The work of Westin and others, while well intentions, has failed to deter the demand for personal data as a commodity and shows the weakness of the privacy compliance work.

The book remains important which is why I think the questions need to be explored.
Best,

Lawrence

actnowtraining's avatarYour Front Page For Information Governance News

The IAPP has republished Alan Westin’s best-known book, Privacy and Freedom, which was first published in 1967. Despite its age, the new version, it is the same text with several introductory essays, provides context for a reader coming to it for the first time. The introductory essays, which include one by Westin on how he viewed his work and its impact, provide a useful context for the author, the book and its relevance.

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Although the introductory essays offer an insight into the book’s impact and the author’s contribution to privacy professional field, a critical essay would have been welcome because the privacy landscape has changed dramatically. The change is more than technological because it includes the change in cultural attitudes to privacy. The cultural and technological changes have undermined his definition.

For most readers, Westin and his book are best known for providing a robust definition of privacy. His book…

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8 Steps to ensure your investigation does not appear to be a cover-up

Posted on June 3, 2014 by lawrence serewicz

This post has been removed as it has been superseded by the post How to write transparent investigation reports.

I would like to thank Donna Boehme of the Compliance Strategists for comments on 8 Steps to ensure your investigation does not appear to be a coverup as I have used them to revise the post.  Any remaining mistakes are my own. 

Compliance Strategists are a leading consulting firm based in the metropolitan New York area, specializing exclusively in compliance, ethics, risk and governance practice.   http://www.compliancestrategists.com/

 

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Has ECJ’s Google ruling made us forget there are other memories?

Posted on May 22, 2014 by lawrence serewicz
English: The Google search homepage, viewed in...

English: The Google search homepage, viewed in Google Chrome. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The recent ruling by the ECJ has raised some concerns about the right to be forgotten. Many commentators have suggested that this ruling means the right to be forgotten exists. However, they have gotten ahead of themselves, as the right to be forgotten, if it is to be created, will arrive when the EU’s latest Data protection directive is agreed. The ruling creates a precedent, but does not create a right. However, the issue is neither the right to be forgotten nor the greater power to remove links, as these are the practical concerns that hide the underlying issue. The focus on the search engine forgets that there are other memories that are not affected by this ruling that intersect with the search engines. Moreover, the role of memory is important so that people can be represented if they are not remembered, they cannot be represented.

What are the other memories?

There are three types of memories that dominate social media: Permanent, Corporate, and Individual.

Permanent

The permanent memory is the state. The state is *the* record keeper. The state made records and records make the state. The state holds your permanent record.[1] It is also the holder of the “official record” (See link on accountability). You can see it is permanent in the way that you cannot erase your birth or your existence from a state’s systems. They hold you in perpetuity. For instance, on the marriage certificates in the United Kingdom, different places record different information about the parents, which suggests the ways that the way the state “remembers” some people is a way to forget others.** In this sense, if the person is not remembered they cannot be represented, which raises secondary questions about the nature of democracy and the institutions that represent individuals.

Corporate

The corporate memory refers to memory held by companies such as Google, Facebook, Experian, and Zurich. Individuals are captured by this memory when they interact with them as customers and provide information. The idea of a corporation goes back to the middle ages.  In the middle ages, the corporation would have been a guild house that existed as an institution between the king and the individual. The ECJ ruling addresses this memory because Google is the one remembering the information even though governments, corporations, or individuals may have supplied it.

Individual

The individual level of memory is whatever anyone can retain or remember personally or within their digital memory. Some commentators have explored how this memory is growing and challenging the other two. The web allows such memories and knowledge to be linked in ways that allows individuals and corporations to challenge the other types of memory. The political and social consequences have been dramatic initially but it is still unfolding. States and corporations have succeeded by their ability to adapt to changes and they are still developing their response to this challenge. At an immediate level, we can see the challenge from individual memories in the way that they can use the web and their enhanced memory capacity to challenge the official history of events like Hillsborough and other incidents where an official version exists but is contested. The individual can create a memory and *share* it through links that challenge the state’s role as a gatekeeper of knowledge and memory. The ECJ has an indirect effect by limiting what can be found by severing the link, but not removing the memory or the engram.

Our collective memory is more than Google. 

The discussion of the ECJ has overlooked these memories. Instead, commentators and analysts have assumed that because Google search engine will be changed that memories of genocides or disputed issues will disappear. However, this misses the wider context of memory that even Google exists within. One could say that the links Google holds are simply tears in an ocean of memory. However, the discussion of the three types of memory only captures the surface, or public, view of memory. We need to look beneath that surface and remember that the public memory, while vast, is only a fraction of the private memory that exists.

Public memories are dwarfed by the private memories

For governments, there are the private memories held by the government and not known or seen by the citizen. The private memory is not limited to intelligence work or investigations from regulatory bodies like tax agencies. Instead, this means the memories created and used in the course of the government’s work to deliver services to its citizens. These memories are created and used by the state without the citizen being aware of them except perhaps by their effect. Please note that this does not include the state using such private memory to punish or coerce through blackmail or repression. I mean this as the bureaucratic shadow that all citizens have but may not recognize.

Do we owe our digital soul to the company store?

For corporations, the private memories can be the work that they do with customer data for analytics or customer profiling. The recent news about actuaries and the work around health profiling has brought this information to the public’s awareness. Some people are aware of it because of the concerns over data mining and data analytics. This is often hidden from view and the public are unaware of it. One only need to see, in the UK, the work of the demographics users group that uses large data sets to profile people just as the credit companies do with work that the public do not usually see. This is not to confuse memory and data but to suggest that discussions about memory and links on Google overlooks that they are built from data. The data is the building block for a memory.

Private memories to challenge the official record

Finally, the ruling misses the private memories of individuals who can, as mentioned above, create rival memories to the state or to the corporation. They can take screenshots or set up memory sites that would not be seen by the individual. One effect of the ruling may encourage a private trade for such memories, where everyone has the potential to be an archivist or a private investigator. Here the ruling can never reach and this is the fastest and widest store of memory. While it is haphazard and less robust than either state or corporation memory, it is a reserve within which the state and the corporation exist because individuals can use those private memories to rally others and they act like engrams within a society. The private memories become like touchstones to remind people in a way that was previously limited to the public archives or even privately controlled archives.  The web allows private memories to become public or at least accessible in ways that were previously not available.

Forget about forgetting, we do not yet understand memory. 

Until we understand the full scale of memory as well as its public and private faces, we cannot address the true concerns about privacy and autonomy. In that sense, the Google ruling will simply make us forget memories and what they mean. What we need to remember is that the ruling and people’s reaction to Google is only a way in which the individual is trying to assert themselves within the community. One can argue quite persuasively that the ruling could eventually be applied to public archives to the extent that they are linked and searchable. Even though this is not discussed nor considered in this ruling, the challenge to memory means that in time the public archives will become as contested as the web. The more they become available, the more the individual will assert their self-professed “right” to control their identity and the community’s memory of them. In that sense, we are starting to see a new era of contested memories.

 

**I am grateful to Stephen Benham who made this point.

Scotland’s People <http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/content/help/index.aspx?r=554&403> “…, name and occupation of father, name and maiden name of mother, …”

Daily Telegraph <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/10594351/Why-cant-your-mothers-name-be-on-your-wedding-certificate.html>

“North of the border, in Scotland, and in Northern Ireland, if you are getting married you will be asked to name both parents on your marriage documentation. So too, across the UK, if you are entering a civil partnership. But when it comes to marriages in England and Wales, mums are left off the official paperwork. The only, rare, exception, is if a mother has been authorised by a court as the ‘sole adopter’, then a couple can make a special request to have her name included, but without court papers, you are stuck.”

Petition on Change.org <http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/mothers-names-should-be-on-marriage-certificates>

[1] We must be careful to remember that there are other institutions that create and retain memories. A well known institution is the church. As Jürgen Habermas pointed out in his book, the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere the Church created a space between the state and crown in terms of public representation. In these rival spaces, the individual could have their identity protected and represented. However, as the state expanded, the crown and the Church, to some extent, have receded as representative institutions. However, they both remain as viable memory stores to rival the state.

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Thoughts on the Trust, Risk, Information and the Law Conference (#TRILCon)

Posted on May 11, 2014 by lawrence serewicz

On the 29th of April, I attended the TRIL Trust, Risk, Information and the Law Conference, in Winchester hosted by the University’s Centre for Information Rights.  The conference was well organised with about 60 attendees.  The day was structured with four sessions. The morning had the opening plenary and the first presentation session. The afternoon followed the same pattern with a plenary and a presentation session. The final session was the closing plenary. People live-tweeted from the event and their tweets can be found at the hashtag #TRILcon on Twitter.

The opening plenary was by Matthew Reed Chief Executive of the Children’s Society “The role of trust and information in assessing risk and protecting the vulnerable.” He gave an insight into how important information and the trust of children for the Society’s work. These are issues that resonate through presentations as trust is at the heart of concerns with data and surveillance. He spoke at length about child poverty, which helped the participants understand how large-scale data collection can build up a better picture of child well-being, which in turn can be analysed to look for trends and other issues.

Questions to consider

An interesting question to consider from this presentation was how to understand the child as both a data subject and a legal person. We need to consider them as an individual, a legal person, for data or information purposes yet still regard them as a child in other contexts. In the context of the Data Protection Act (DPA) the test for a subject access request from a child usually relies upon the age of 12 years old where a data controller needs to consider whether they can decide whether their own interests regarding the request. Yet, society sees a different age for other legal acts such as sexual consent is 15 and the age for voting is 18. At the same time, though a child is a data subject from birth even though an adult with parental responsibility will have a large influence on the child’s access to data and their existence as a digital individual. Therefore, a child in care has to rely on the organisation or the state to act as their parent for data protection purposes.

The opening plenary helped set the stage for the first set of presentations. The schedule can be found here.

The conference had a number of presentation strands and had depth and variety. I attended my panel, Surveillance, encryption, State secrets & fashion! The first paper was on Spain’s transparency laws. The paper suggested that political culture’s view of transparency shaped the public’s understanding of its success and possible constraints. The challenge was whether the public could look beyond the headlines when the Spanish government appeared to have a greater influence over Spanish media than UK media.

My presentation was on Blinding the Leviathan: Encryption Surveillance and the Digital State of Nature.  In that presentation, I argued that surveillance was necessary to fulfil the sovereign’s fundamental responsibility and contract with the citizen. The sovereign is created to deliver public safety and because it had the right to determine peace and war within the state, it had to have the means to ensure that it was not threatened which included surveillance of the public space. I then suggested that the digital state of nature DSON, which is similar to the state of nature that Hobbes argued man escaped by creating a sovereign, presented a new challenge. The DSON blurred the clear line between domestic and foreign, public and private, and friend and enemy. Therefore, the Leviathan’s surveillance has to extend into these areas. Yet, when individuals used encryption to thwart the state, it blinds the Leviathan and limits its ability to protect the individuals. A blind Leviathan was still strong enough to deliver the benefits people wanted, their many and expanding rights, but unable to look into any areas that the individual, rather than the state, decided. The result, though, will not be increased freedom and autonomy but the opposite as the state lacks the means to deliver the many and expanding rights of citizens.

The next presentation was excellent. The University of Winchester and London College of Fashion collaborated on the paper. The multimedia presentation offer a fashion show to explore the ways in which wearable computing, like Google Glass and other devices, was changing how we hide from surveillance and the ways in which it enhanced surveillance. A number of interesting points and ideas were presented on the way that data, trust, risk, and information could and did intersect with our most intimate experiences.

Questions to consider

What is the relationship between fashion, our identity, and surveillance? If we wear various personae to fit within different contexts, does ubiquitous surveillance, through our lifestyle devices, penetrate those personae to reveal us? Our concern with surveillance may result in an iterative relationship, where technology defeats technology, so that fashion to thwart surveillance is only available to a few in much the same way haute couture is only available to a few.

 Afternoon Plenary: Statistics

The afternoon plenary looked at the use of statistics in law looking at the Bayes Theorem and Likelihood tests with a presentation by Professor Norman Fenton “Improving probability and risk assessment in the law.” As the presenter explained, the problem of using the statistics was not just the public having difficulty understanding the maths. Instead, it showed how statistical experts often presented the theorems and the inferences incorrectly, which created problems. As many businesses, such as Amazon, use algorithms and Bayesian probability theory to help profile customers based on their interactions and purchase trends, the session was useful. Though focused more on the use of statistics in law it did show a wider application for other fields such as behavioural advertising and other predictive systems that rely upon big data.

 The Afternoon presentations.

I attended the session on Data linking, statistical disclosure control, Facebook privacy policies and the right to be forgotten.

The Facebook session looked at the problem of privacy statements being limited by what the customer could understand. In a survey of 100 university students (undergraduate and graduate) only 4% had read their Facebook privacy agreement. As a result, it may be difficult to assess how well these capture consent that is fully informed, specific, and freely given. Another problem highlighted by the paper was that privacy statements are usually written in English and then translated into a host country’s language. A poor translation compounded the difficulties experienced with understanding the consent. The user is then left vulnerable because they will not be aware of or able to understand the ways in which their privacy statement may have explained how their data is going to be used, stored, and potentially sold.

Questions to consider

An interesting question from this paper was the extent we take consent for granted in the digital domain. Even if we have well designed privacy notices and opt in or opt out statements, how well does this capture consent and would it really be able to capture any future uses? The deeper problem, perhaps at a philosophical level, is how we demonstrate consent to the other laws and to the government in general when we have to make repeated and detailed consents when our data is used but our other behaviour, such as driving, does not attract the same requirements. We start to see a possible tension between the physical and digital domains.

The next paper on Big Data and the right to be forgotten offered an insight into whether we can be forgotten with large data bases that link data. Another problem was the tension between the digital person and the public person in that a public act may be remember or forgotten in a way that is different from the way in which a digital act is remembered or forgotten.

Questions to consider

In the digital age, who remembers determines whether it can be forgotten. The “official record” may be expunged, but the individual can remember now as well as the state can. Will the right to be forgotten extend to the private domain where rival memories are created and maintained? If the concern about linking and big data relies upon data quality, can that quality be assured in the future? A further question is whether the linking and data can resist or overcome strategies to muddle the history or paint a counter narrative. In that sense, the session on statistics will help us determine whether the history we are reading, through the linked big data, is accurate.

 

The final plenary: [De]-anonymisation & technology panel*

The final plenary brought together a number of speakers on this topic. What was of interest was the presence of the ICO on the panel as they had set the code for anonymisation and psuedonymisation. They pointed that they were the first Regulator in the EU to publish such a standard.  The panel discussed the problems associated with the process and with making sure such data could not be identified by future, yet, unidentified methods.

Questions to consider

Can the tension between useful and meaningful data and personally identifiable data be reconciled? The richer the personal data sets being used the greater the potential to identify someone. Will the concern over data be mitigated by the natural law of data inertia or decay? The data quality could not always be assured so gaps and problem could render its use moot at worst or difficult at best. As the data decays or lacks a robust quality, can we be certain that the correct re-identified someone with great confidence.

Final thoughts

The conference was a success. I found the breadth of papers and presentations stimulating. In my session, I had a number of interested and insightful questions. All the papers sparked discussions and further ideas. The event was well managed and structured. I would recommend people involved with information governance to attend any future events. I have organised similar events and I appreciate the amount of work needed to host and run such events. The Centre for Information Rights offered an excellent day and a lot of stimulating content and discussion, which is exactly what you want from a conference.

 

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What is a privacy strategist?

Posted on May 7, 2014 by lawrence serewicz
A Common Access Card, with personal data redacted.

A Common Access Card, with personal data redacted. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Business will need someone to help them deal with the increased risks associated with using personal data. They need someone who can help them exploit the business opportunities of personal data and assure customers, and employees, about their privacy concerns. The risks around personal data and customer privacy have increased. From the data breach at Target to Heartbleed across all industries, people are worried about how their personal data is being used. The NSA revelations woke many people up to the threats and made it a major concern for citizens, customers and employees. The public are concerned about the privacy impact of the ways in which businesses and governments use their personal data. If their personal data is being used as a commodity, how will it affect them? They know that companies want to profit from services and products that use personal, but that has serious risks for their privacy. To adapt to these new risks, and opportunities, companies need a privacy strategist.

You need more than data protection training

A privacy strategist will understand how the use or misuse of personal data will affect a company. If they work with government, they will also understand how the privacy of clients and employees is affected by the use or misuse of personal data. Data protection Act. They combine the following skills and knowledge areas as they relate to privacy as well the opportunities and risk with personal data.

  • Information Management: understanding the lifecycle of information
  • Reputation Management: understanding how to manage privacy breaches
  • Freedom of Information Act
  • Environmental Information Regulations
  • Human Rights Act
  • Training and presentation skills

Their knowledge of the privacy legislation will be important, but their role is more than a compliance officer or a regulatory expert. They will be able to advise organisations on the opportunities around personal data for products and services. By looking beyond regulatory compliance; the privacy strategist’s work links directly to the company’s business strategy. However, their work is not just about reassuring clients and customers. Their role covers how the company manages the privacy concerns of employees, which means they need to be able to explain and present this material. Like an information rights advocate, they will have a role in explaining the balance between the rights of the employees and the company’s requirements.

Public or Private Sector, you still need a privacy strategist

The strategist can work in private and public sectors because privacy remains constant. Even though governments may use personal data to a different end, they share the same risks and concerns as the private sector. To help the public sector manage those risks and opportunities, a privacy strategist will shape the organisation’s approach to privacy. They can advise on issues from a data breach to improving a policy’s privacy impact. An organisation can reassure clients and customers by show its commitment to privacy with a privacy strategist.

If personal data is the new commodity, then a new type of worker is needed. Can you succeed in the emerging market of personal data without a privacy strategist?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0s41-npy3M

 

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Where do you discuss bad news?

Posted on April 14, 2014 by lawrence serewicz

In any organisation, you have to discuss bad news but few people consider where it is discussed. How you discuss bad news will influence, if not determine, the success of your company. The issue is more than critical upwards communication in which junior staff have to be able to report bad (or critical) news upwards either formally or informally. The issue is more than a concern with the learning organisation and double loop versus single loop learning where a company has to learn from its mistakes. Instead, it is something fundamental, which was missing at Enron. At Enron, there was literally nowhere to discuss bad news. Bad news was not suppressed staff had no place to discuss it outside existing management structures. The reporting lines within services and within organisations can reinforce the existing cultural or managerial expectations about bad news or good news. If there is no place for the junior or midlevel managers, who understood something was going wrong, to meet to discuss the issues, then the organisation lacks a critical core needed to deal with bad news. The critical core is rarely at the senior level because they usually do not know about the bad news or take a personal or organisational interest in managing such discussions.

How, where and why BN is discussed will tell you about the organisation and its health. If your management team meetings or extended management team meetings are only focused on good news or what is planned, you give the implicit message that only good news or approved news is to be brought to the meeting. The desire to hear good news, especially in collective meetings, is understandable. No one likes to hear bad news no matter how important it may be. The larger the meeting the less it will be an appropriate place to discuss bad news because it can be seen as criticism. If the bad news becomes a criticism, then in a large group setting it can become like a re-education camp where underperforming units are held to account or to blame. Such an approach will be unintended, but it can easily become the default setting when people set out to discuss bad news. The challenge is to find the right place, the right amount of people, to discuss bad news.

What is bad news?

To understand the problem we need to consider the types of bad news. Broadly speaking there are three types of bad news (BN)

  1. BN staff know
  2. BN only managers know
  3. BN only senior managers know.

Bad news in an organisation is usually of three types, performance, external shocks, and internal shocks. Bad news is not idle gossip or personal problems of staff. Bad news is something that affects the organisation either directly, we are going out of business, or indirectly, division x has lost 10 billion dollars and we need to find the money from all budgets. In most cases, but not all, the bad news has a direct and immediate effect on the company’s reputation. However, bad news is not simply poor performance because performance related issues have an agreed process nor is it well known public news such as the outcome of a trial or a long awaited regulatory sanction.

We may believe that discussing bad news has an obvious reason. However, the reason for discussing bad news reflects an organisation’s cultural norms. This is different from a culture of good news. Instead, it is based on the idea that employees have to follow an internal cultural code that dictates why, how and where bad news is discussed. On the surface, this appears obvious because we discuss bad news when there is a problem to be solved. However, this overlooks the secondary issue of why is there a problem or more precisely “Why do you think there is a problem that needs to be discussed?” A cultural norm may suggest that why you discuss bad news can be understood depending on its context. Is it about under performance? Or is it a threat, a criticism or is it whistle blowing? Senior managers can be unwilling or unable to ask for bad news or to give bad news because the culture norms within their organisation create the fear that they will “make their boss” look bad or be seen as a trouble maker.

Bad news is always a challenge to the chain of command

A closely related concern is the chain of command. The chain of command provides a way to communicate and control decisions within an organisation. It also provides a place and a method for discussing bad news. The discussion will occur within the chain of command and be passed upwards or it is resolved at the proper level. The command level at each level is the place where bad news is to be discussed. One can be disciplined for violating the chain of command by telling a senior manager bad news that the middle manager will tell them. However, the command and control system has problems because it does not create a place for discussing organisation wide bad news.

Most bad news is hidden until it goes away, solves itself or explodes

In many organisations, bad news is kept in silos or hidden because of the chain of command. In some cases, the corporate or departmental culture wants to avoid bad news. If bad news is suppressed or hidden, it can reach dysfunctional levels. Most organisations are very good at single loop learning. They can solve a problem as it emerges. Many companies are not good at double loop learning where they prevent problems by modifying systems to remove the cause of the problems. If a company relies exclusively on single loop learning, then managers only deal with symptoms because that is what they are rewarded for doing. If bad news is not discussed openly or in a place where a wider perspective can be used, manager can learn that the best way to avoid problems is to avoid reporting them or discovering them and not dealing with the causes. They simply explain things are going ok and soften the news so that bad news is watered down into mild news or becomes god news.

 

A place to discuss bad news creates the opportunity to define its limits.

If senior managers do not have a place to discuss bad news they may hide it from other senior manages. In this case, the chain of command removes the places where bad news can be discussed.  As a result, senior managers only find out about bad news from external events, bad news in the press, or from external inquiries, like an auditor, who suddenly create a space where bad news can be discussed because individual managers who may be able to see the issue cannot meet to discuss the bad news. In these situations, the performance management system and performance information become a proxy for discussing bad news. The art of indirect reporting or simply focusing on the targets that are working well is rewarded. Instead of discussing bad news, the conversation is about under performance and a discussion focuses on the quality of the performance indicators and the performance management process rather than the actual problem, the bad news. People seek to change the target or say that the target is unfair or can be qualified in a variety of methods. Bad news is not discussed openly.

Are your corporate cultural norms keeping such a place from forming?

Culture norms in an organisation can inhibit bad news and remove the areas where it can be discussed. The culture norms of an organisation can make it appear that to discuss bad news you have challenged the organisation. You are a troublemaker. When these norms exist, bad news is only discussed by indirect means. People gossip about it or talk in the hallways but never in the meeting room. The bad news becomes capital or ammunition within the bureaucratic negotiations or battles within the organisation. For example, if a junior employee discovered a security leak. They would not have a place to discuss it. Instead, they would tell their senior managers so they can use this information and manage it. The demand that such actions be channelled upwards means that bad news is contained and managed within the chain of command.

What is to be done?

First, an organisation must create a place where people can discuss bad news. A formal meeting could prove counterproductive as no bad news is ever discussed. A place could be created indirectly; so that challengescan be considered to create, the space to discuss that comes from discussions that cover Strength, Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) meetings. At the same time, the organisation can look at how it does communicate critical informationupward and link that to the

English: Stokes, NC, 09/16/1999 -- Pitt County...

English: Stokes, NC, 09/16/1999 — Pitt County State Emergency Management Team and Emergency Management manager Bobby Joyner (R-Blue, glasses) and SERT Wesley Greene (red hat) meet with shelter officials at the Stokes Elementary School and discuss needs for housing 160 families. Photo by Dave Gatley/ FEMA News Photo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

way managers meet to discuss topics. The best approach is for senior managers to convene off the record meetings where they ask pointed questions like “Tell me what is going wrong and what needs to be done.”  Such meetings cannot emerge overnight, as the senior managers have to be trusted not to be using this to seek out disloyalty or doubt and to be aware that few employees will speak the truth, at least initially, in such settings.

 

Bad news is a reality. What you can control is how you manage it. If you do not have a space for discussing bad news where managers can meet to explore the issue, then you may have more than bad news to manage.

 

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Is privacy the myth that encourages us to be the state’s standing digital reserve?

Posted on April 11, 2014 by lawrence serewicz
Cray X-MP/24 (serial no. 115) used by NSA

Cray X-MP/24 (serial no. 115) used by NSA (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A recent story on the BBC highlighted the number of data breaches reported by Welsh local government councils. Aside from the questions about the breaches, how they can be prevented, and whether the reporting mechanism encourages or discourages organisations from self-reporting, a deeper question about digital privacy emerges. Does the Data Protection Act, a breach of it, or digital privacy even matter?

When a breach occurs and whether or not the organisation tells them or the regulatory, we face a problem. After the initial anger, though, the subject or victim suddenly realize they are literally powerless in the face of the breach of the principle or the law.  They have little basis for which to seek redress. Yes, they can file a complaint with the organisation. Yes, they can get the regulator, the Information Commissioner Office (ICO) interested in taking enforcement action, but that does not satisfy their injury. The data is still lost.

A data breach or lost data, so what?

At that moment, we start to see what is missing from the moral panics created by the Snowden affair and from the HMRC debacle.  So far, we have to ask who has been harmed and what types of harm have the people who suffered the breach experienced?  I do not mean that people are not upset by a council losing their data, or the NSA accessing their data, or even the HMRC losing their personal details, but what is the harm? As we reflect on this point, we start to realize that the loss of personal data is relatively inconsequential aside from the annoyance factor. We have to consider that our current digital development is relatively primitive so we have not seen the full range of ways that our personal data, even a small amount of it, can (and will be) exploited by the state or the private sector.[1]  The reason being is that there is a difficulty in showing the harm to our digital person in a way that we can show the harm to our physical person from a faulty toaster or a flawed car design where millions of cars recalled when someone gets hurt.

Privacy will not be created or defended by a regulator

Now, before someone asks the silly question that comes with discussions like this, “Well, would you want your data lost or published”, the obvious answer is no. However, that is not the question. The issue is what the redress is for someone who suffers a data breach or has their personal data exploited in ways they did not expect or want. So far, the redress is at best indirect. You can get the organisation to apologize. You may even find one or two that seek to pay you a small amount of money to avoid the hassle of dealing with any legal claims or the bureaucratic paperwork associated with dealing with a regulator. Look at how the banks regularly pay money as mitigation in regulatory investigations. A similar approach, from the regulator’s view is the use of deferred prosecutions.[2] The approach does offer tactical and strategic advantages for both parties except it does not satisfy the aggrieved. In other words, their access to justice is limited to what the regulator feels is in the public interest, which gives us an insight into the coming problems with personal data.

Leaving aside the regulatory pressures, the individual will have a hard time showing damage and distress unless they have experienced it directly, immediately and physically.[3] The problem, at least from those wishing to assert privacy as being control over personal information, is to define or suggest what damage occurs from losing your bank details or your pension details (remember the breach with the contractor who decided to dispose of them in the skip, the personal data was considered minor), thus personal data lost, but no big deal (yes it was a big deal for the Council and the ICO) but for the individuals affected, they had to live with it.[4]

Privacy but what is the damage and distress?

What further adds to the inadequacy of asserting privacy is based on control over personal data is that the loss of control or abuse of that control are not grounded in torts or the injuries to the digital person (or even the physical person) that are easy to know or quantify. In the UK, anyone seeking compensation must be able to show distress and damage.[5] For the most part, the distress never amounts to the damages required to create the basis for a compensation claim.  We can see this in the care.data furore. In this case, the public, or at least the data protection savvy part of the public, were concerned that the health data made available to health care providers would create discrimination against people with health problems.[6] So far, we cannot quantify or identify immediate individual harms based upon the companies having access to the database.  We can feel or believe that it is unfair, but we rarely if ever have laws that say “The community feel aggrieved and thus this is harm”. Instead, we look for individual harms have Mr. X or Ms Y suffered as a result and can they demonstrate it. The problem though is how do you demonstrate that Facebook is discriminating against you in their service provision because you happen to like or dislike something? What would be your evidence, what would be the harm you would show?

The bureaucratic tyranny at the heart of the modern state.

We arrive with the hidden issue. We seem to overlook or forget that data sharing and the use of our personal data for the public interest is embedded in much of the UK legislation.[7] So we may have a situation where we may be seeing our crime rates getting lower (or our health improving) because the police and the government, including local authorities, (or the medical professionals) no longer see as many problems, the fear or risk aversion from breaching the DPA are disappearing, and the willingness to share increases, *even at the expense of people’s rights*. As no one knows about it or even if they did the public interest supports the government (even if it does not condone it) or the effort to challenge by the individual is so far removed or difficult (if you are being done for murder are you really going to focus on the potential data breach?) the sharing becomes easier.  Thus, we see a bureaucratic tyranny emerging that is as silent and efficient as parliament has wanted given the number of laws that encourage (without demanding or explicitly requiring) sharing because they all serve the common good (even though they might have individual cases of harm).  From the perspective of the state, such legislation is the minimum it will tolerate for it does not want anything that will inhibit its ability to act. To an extent this is what the public want, but it shows the tension, if not the failure, of liberalism as the individual “rights” have to be balanced against state “authority”, especially as the state ensures the individual’s rights.

Share because it is better to trample a few rights than have a murder.

One need only note the near seismic shift since the Bichard Enquiry on the police approach to sharing. One could put it crudely to say that the shift has been from share very little to share everything. The logic for the police being it is better to have the occasional person complain about rights being trampled (Mr. Catt[8]) than to explain to everyone why their failure to share allowed someone like (Mr. Huntley) to kill young girls[9] or a relative kill a child (Victoria Climbie).[10]  At the same time, we see this tension in the NHS, trying to protect Sensitive Personal Data (health data) (your data is confidential you will consent to any use of it)[11] even as the UK government wants to open up health databases to be harvested and exploited for the public good.

We come to the realization that the UK’s excellent medical databases become another resource to be exploited by the state. Instead of coal or North Sea oil, the UK will use their data (the personal data of its citizens) as their comparative advantage, the natural resource, to be exploited to make the UK economy run.[12]

The dual impasse inadequate laws to deal with being the standing reserve

Thus, we arrive at a dual impasse. First our laws are developed for our physical person. We do not yet have a way to protect our digital person except to the point it relates to our physical person. Thus, as the demands on our digital person grow and we find it difficult to trace it back to our physical person and even if we do we find it difficult to show the harm. Any attempt so far has shown the incoherence of the concept of privacy and leave unresolved the horrific consequences of reducing us to a digital person. Second, we want to protect personal data (the autonomous individual is sacrosanct so we must believe from Mr Snowden) except that it (the individual) is now the standing reserve to be harvested so that the economy and the state, can deliver better outcomes and deliver the services the public want.[13]

The terms and conditions of the modern state.

What we now have is the dawning realization that the terms and conditions of the modern state are coming due. Our personal data, beyond taxes, is what makes the state move and we want the state (and the wider economy) to continue to provide us with our benefits so that our rights are enforced and expanded and we want our Facebook, Google, and Amazon preferences tailored to us as individuals. Even if we wanted to recast the social contract, how can we if we do not, and never have, controlled our personal data as these breaches demonstrate and the right to be forgotten reminds us?

 

[1] Yes, we can show examples of people suffering bad things. But for the vast majority of breaches, we still do not have a clear cause and effect between breach and harm, which is the point I am arguing. (The harm from the Snowden issue is not on the wheat, but on the chaff.  They have probably harvested my details but so far neither Seal Team 6 nor the SAS has been in contact nor do I expect them to be.)

[2] See for example this analysis which suggests that they are used excessively for fear of a criminal conviction becoming a “death penalty” Markoff, Gabriel, Arthur Andersen and the Myth of the Corporate Death Penalty: Corporate Criminal Convictions in the Twenty-First Century (August 20, 2012). 15 University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business Law 797 (2013). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2132242 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2132242 As well as a similar analysis that suggest that it is open to abuse. Uhlmann, David M., Deferred Prosecution and Non-Prosecution Agreements and the Erosion of Corporate Criminal Liability (October 1, 2013). Maryland Law Review, Vol. 72, No. 4, 2013; U of Michigan Public Law Research Paper No. 352. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2334230

[3]Yes, there is a recent case where a group of people sued Islington Council and sought damages for having to move because their personal details were disclosed. However, this is one case in the thousands of data breaches that have been reported. Perhaps, most of these cases are resolved beneath this level, the small payments to avoid the drawn out legal or bureaucratic processes (the crude cost-benefit approach), but that seems unlikely given that the public sector, in particular, are loath to spend money as freely as the financial sector or rather the financial sector calculates the cost benefit analysis quicker or has less ego in trying to solve a problem. J

[4] As this analysis shows, there is a weakness at the heart of the ICO’s enforcement system. http://amberhawk.typepad.com/amberhawk/2013/08/does-quashing-the-scottish-borders-monetary-penalty-mean-a-change-to-ico-enforcement-policy.html

[5] The central case in this issue is Johnson v. Medical Defence Union. See this blog for analysis of recent developments on this area as it relates to Data Protection law in the UK. http://informationrightsandwrongs.com/2013/05/17/damages-under-s13-data-protection-act-an-opportunity-lost/

[6] The data sharing programme was halted until the communication could be improved and the concerns by interested parties were addressed. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/10634539/Crisis-of-confidence-in-NHS-database-warn-GPs.html

[7] See for example, Children’s Act 2004 section 11 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/31/section/11 See for example, Crime and Disorder Act 1998 section 17 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/37/section/17 coupled with section 115 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/37/section/115

 

 

[8] Mr Catt is a non-violent campaigner who found out that his DNA was on a police extremist database even though he had done nothing criminal to warrant the inclusion on the database. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-21783596

 

[9] See the Bichard Inquiry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bichard_report following the Soham murders. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soham_murders

[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Victoria_Climbi%C3%A9

[11] http://www.hscic.gov.uk/confguideorg

[12] See for example Francis Maude’s award from the Demographics Users Group in 2011 https://www.gov.uk/government/news/top-companies-commend-francis-maude-for-open-data More generally consider the report from World Economic Forum http://www.weforum.org/reports/personal-data-emergence-new-asset-class

[13] Martin Heidegger foresaw this development in his work on the Question Concern Technology which he presented in 1955. In the essay the key passage for our concerns now is the following This danger attests itself to us in two ways. As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but does, rather, exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of the objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing reserve, ten he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. P.26-27 (Harper Torchbook Martin Heidegger The Question Concerning Technology and other essays.)

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Improvement

Posted on April 10, 2014 by lawrence serewicz

This blog post captures the move to a modern approach to work where location does not matter because what matters is the ability to be connected either digitally or physically with colleagues. Work is not about place. It is about the room for improvement. Have you thought about whether you have room for improvement.

philjackman's avatarThoughts from a Guerrilla Worker

Day 9 of the A to Z Blogging Challenge.

The biggest room in your business should be the room for improvement. Is it? I hope it’s bigger than the room for complacency. Perhaps this is a big room where you work. It shouldn’t be. Haven’t you heard it said that there is no room for complacency?

We have a room for improvement. It used to be my office.

I didn’t want an office. My work doesn’t require me to be alone. My work doesn’t require me to have status. We needed a place to meet with people. In a building filled with unoccupied desks there is surprisingly little meeting space and so I changed my office into a meeting room. It has its own booking system as well as tea and coffee facilities but it still had my name on the door and the cynics and the doubters said…

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