Over the weekend, chatting with friends, I heard myself going off on what I imagine sounded like a paranoid fantasy fuelled privacy rant. But it stems from my own confusion about what it means for so much data to be out there about us, and whether the paranoid fantasy bit actually relates to: – the … Continue reading “Tin Foil Hats or Baseball Caps? Why Your Face is a Cookie and Your Data is midata”
A CTRL-Shift blog post entitled MIDATA Legislation Begins mentions, but doesn’t link to, “an amendment to the Enterprise and Regulator Reform Bill in the House of Lords”, presumably referring to paragraphs 58C*, 58D* and 58E* proposed by Viscount Younger of Leckie in the Seventh Marshalled List of Amendments: 58C* Insert the following new Clause— “Supply … Continue reading “#Midata Is Intended to Benefit Whom, Exactly?”
The Twittertubes were all abuzz yesterday with news about the UKGov’s announcement on #midata (even though the press release everyone was referring to came out earlier?). It’s still not clear to me what announcement was actually made yesterday, or where? [Ah… seems the actual statement relates to the Government’s response to the midata consultation, along … Continue reading “So What, #midata? And #yourData, #ourData…”
A BIS Press Release (Next steps making midata a reality) seems to have resulted in folk tweeting today about the #midata consultation that was announced last month. If you haven’t been keeping up, #midata is the policy initiative around getting companies to make “[consumer data] that may be actionable and useful in making a decision … Continue reading “From Communications Data to #midata – with a Mobile Phone Data Example”
Yesterday, UK gov folk announced what I imagine someone, somewhere, has termed “a breakthrough in consumer empowerment”, a voluntary scheme for corporates to opt in to that means they may let us have access to some of the data they’ve collected about us. According to BBC technology reporter Rory Cellan-Jones (Midata: Will the public share … Continue reading “We Can Haz Our Personal Data Back from Corporates? #midata”
A few months ago, I noticed that the Google geolocation service would return a lat/long location marker when provided with the MAC address of a wifi router (Using Google to Look Up Where You Live via the Physical Location of Your Wifi Router [code]) and in various other posts I’ve commented on how communities of … Continue reading "Community Detection? (And Is Your Phone a Cookie?)"
Last week, the UK Gov announced an Independent Commission on Freedom of Information (written statement) to consider: whether there is an appropriate public interest balance between transparency, accountability and the need for sensitive information to have robust protection whether the operation of the Act adequately recognises the need for a ‘safe space’ for policy development … Continue reading “FOI and Communications Data”
A handful of posts caught my attention yesterday around the whole data thang… First up, a quote on the New Aesthetic blog: “the state-of-the-art method for shaping ideas is not to coerce overtly but to seduce covertly, from a foundation of knowledge”, referencing an article on Medium: Is the Internet good or bad? Yes. The … Continue reading “A Nudge Here, A Nudge There, But With Meaning..”
Not content with selling off public services, is the government doing all it can to monetise us by means other than taxation by looking for ways of selling off aggregated data harvested from our interaction as users of public services? For example, “Better information means better care” (door drop/junk mail flyer) goes the slogan that … Continue reading “Is the UK Government Selling You Off?”
Via @wilm, I notice that it’s time again for someone (this time at the Wall Street Journal) to have written about the scariness that is your Google personal web history (the sort of thing you probably have to opt out of if you sign up for a new Google account, if other recent opt-in by … Continue reading “More Digital Traces…”
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