Robin Wilton's esoterica

I wonder what Gordon Brown thinks, now, of the man to whom he bequeathed the nation's finances. For all Brown's talk, over the past decade or more, or economic growth and stability, not many of the financial headlines are positive at the moment.

The UK's second-largest high-street bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, is to invite its shareholders to a £10bn rights issue to strengthen its financial position; at least that's going to be at the expense of investors (though many of those will, indirectly, be pensions savers);

- The government has already stepped in to bail out, as an as-yet indeterminate cost to the tax-payer, the sub-prime losses of Northern Rock;

- The Bank of England is to assume some £50bn of restructuring liability by offering to exchange banks' risky sub-prime exposure for long-term government bonds... thus hoping to re-inject some liquidity into the markets for the course of the current credit crisis;

- Labour's own back-benchers, and some junior ministers, are rumoured to be revolting over the Chancellor's abolition of the 10% band for low-income taxpayers;

- Non-EU workers in the restaurant sector are protesting that a new immigration 'points' system  may threaten the viability of up to 30% of the restaurants they represent - including those staples of British cuisine, Indian and Chinese food...

And against all that as a background, plans to impose an additional levy on 'non-domiciled' foreign taxpayers seem almost certain to cost the economy more than they can possibly raise in tax revenue.

This snippet from a BBC interview with Deepak Malhotra, a "non-doms'" tax specialist, sums it up:

"A typical example of a non-dom client is a family from India worth
several hundred million pounds through their property interests and
private equity funds.

They initially decided to live in the UK mainly because of the
favourable tax regime for non-doms, and because they were happy for
their children to be educated within the British system.

Although they spent some time in the US and India, they spend more
than six months per year in the UK. But they have no particular need to
continue doing so as they have numerous options to base themselves
overseas.

These non-doms contribute a huge amount to the economy through
employment by their companies, tax paid by their employees and value
added tax, insists Mr Malhotra."

Mr Malhotra's other clients include similarly-positioned entrepreneurs from Pakistan.

It's ironic, isn't it, that at a time when so much of the political landscape is shaped by issues of personal migration and global cultural diversity, we seem set to exclude some of those who might otherwise contribute so favourably, through not just their own efforts but also those of their children.

I'd heard the expression RT(F)M... but only heard of RTFO yeaterday. It's the "Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation"; new UK legislation under which petrol and diesel fuel must now contain a percentage of biofuel. It's set at 2.5% initially, rising to 5% in 2010.

It sounds like a good idea (to increase the proportion of fuel which comes from renewable sources, as opposed to fossil sources), but the measure seems to have attracted more criticism than praise. Mostly this centres around the question of whether it is enough to simply say that the biofuel must meet sustainability criteria. There are three main objections, as far as I can determine:

1 - some ways of producing biofuel are likely to generate more carbon dioxide than they save;

2 - some land diverted to biofuel production might otherwise have been devoted to food production;

3 - the legislation may introduce an incentive to destroy diverse habitat such as rainforest, so as to replace it with biofuel monocultures.

All of this seems to raise a question which is quite pressing given that the RTFO target is to double in two years' time: are the current 'sustainability' criteria specific enough to ensure that the target is met in a way which does not do more harm than good, and can they be effectively enforced? After all, who - in the UK - is going to be able to verify that a non-UK oil company is not paying farmers in a third country to grow biofuels on cleared rainforest... and then stop them from doing so?

And very nice it was, too. The 13th conference of the Porvoo Group was held between Tromsø and Trondheim in Norway last week, and they were kind enough to invite me to speak on the subject of Electronic Identity and Privacy. Trondheim airport (or rather, Værnes airport, which is about 35kms from Trondheim itself), is situated right next to the small town of Hell. It was fairly cold there last week, but I couldn't honestly say that it had frozen over (which, presumably, is why those unlikely things you were waiting for haven't happened yet).

And speaking of eternal darkness, here's a photo of the monument marking the point at which the Norwegian Express Ferry route (Hurtigruten) crosses the Arctic Circle. This is the southernmost latitude at which it is possible to experience Polar night or Polar day (i.e. a night in which the sun fails to rise above the horizon, or a day in which it does not drop below it).

More later on the content of the conference, but in the meantime, many thanks to the Porvoo Group organisers, and especially everyone from the Registry Centre in Brønnøysund, where we were welcomed with exceptional warmth and style.  

[Apologies - I meant to post this on April 7th., but got sidetracked.] 

Perhaps it's naive to think that there's any such thing as 'pure' sport, untainted by grubbier considerations. After all, Berlin (1936), Munich (1972) and Moscow (1980) all held games in which politics was a significant, if unwelcome factor. In recent decades, the commercial factors (sponsorship, product placement, broadcasting) seem to have increased exponentially - and in 1984, combining the two, Russia boycotted the Los Angeles Olympics, citing their over-commercialisation as its reason for pulling out.

Growing up with the Cold War games, I often had the impression that they were being turned from a contest between individual athletes to one in which competing economic and political ideologies battled it out for the biggest haul of medals. Which could produce the better performance - individualism and free enterprise, or all-pervading devotion to the socialist state? Mary Decker or Nadia Komaneci...?

There must presumably still be some people who cling to the Olympic ideal that sport and politics are best not crammed, willy nilly, into the same bed. They, above all, must have been wndering what the Olympic torch was doing in front of Number 10 Downing Street yesterday. Apparently Gordon Brown wanted to appear with it in the company of prospective British Olympians - a laudable enough aim, in itself. But a little finesse might perhaps have suggested a venue with sporting connotations, rather than purely political ones. After all, the torch was on its way to Stratford, site of the London Games in 2012.

In any case, today's news stories suggest that the Olympic ideal has been rather fatally undermined elsewhere. Apparently officials in Paris twice snuffed out the torch 'for safety reasons'. It was then re-lit from one of the back-up lanterns which accompany it. I thought the whole point was that the flame made the whole journey unextinguished. Otherwise isn't it, well... cheating?

The Information Commissioner's Press Release from yesterday is worth a look. The Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill was to have contained a clause introducing prison sentences for those convicted of trafficking illegally in personal data; that clause has apparently been watered down to the point where the Justice Secretary "will be able to introduce prison sentences if illegal activity continues"... though in the meantime the penalty will continue to be a financial one. Given that, in the same press release, the ICO cites some of the kinds of trafficking which it has exposed over the last two years or more, one has to wonder what further activity the Justice Secretary is waiting for.

I was lucky enough to take part in a fascinating discussion yesterday evening, with a mixture of policy-makers, regulators and technologists. The conversation took place under the Chatham House Rule, to encourage frankness, so I can't say who said what - but here's a snippet which neatly encapsulated one of the key topics.

"If you've just spent over £5bn on an ID cards system, and commercial organisations start to offer you large sums of money to mine various bits of the personal data you hold, the pressure to say 'yes' is going to be huge".

In the context of recent remarks about the Oyster Card database (see my previous post), and the publication of just how much cash the DVLA will admit to having raised through the sale of personal data, I'd say that's an entirely valid concern.

A lot of the discussion also circles around the different data-sharing perspectives of "service-providing" public sector bodies (such as, for instance, the health service, or benefits agencies) and "enforcing" public sector bodies such as Revenue and Customs, or the police and intelligence services. My own belief is that, where it's a matter of service provision, much more still needs to be done to give the citizen the ability to exercise consent and control over the disclosure and sharing of her/his data.

To take a relatively well-worn case: the example of "change of address" is often cited as a justification for public sector data-sharing; the argument is often that it is time-consuming and inconvenient for the citizen to have to write separately to each public sector body to notify them of a change of address. That may be so - but I think it's wrong to focus exclusively on that use-case while ignoring two others:

1 - some people would rather make their own decision about whether to allow their data to be shared, or whether to accept the 'inconvenience' of notifying individual bodies that they have moved house;

2 - some people seldom, if ever, move house. Unbridled data-sharing on behalf of those people who have no need for a joined-up 'change of address notification service' seems to me to be entirely inappropriate.

I think most of the people involved in yesterday's discussion readily grasp the importance of the distinction between consensual and enforcement-related data-sharing, but I think there are plenty of others who need to appreciate it more clearly and, as yet, do not. "Consensuality" might a hard word to spread, but it could be fun trying...

Oh, and here's the other reason the evening was such fun. This is the view from one of the windows of where we were:

It's part of the grounds of the Palace of Westminster. :^)  I have no idea where that cloaked bull came from, but I would be disappointed if it wasn't nicknamed... Ermine-trude.

A few years ago, before DVD players supplanted VCRs, the safest bet, if you wanted to operate or program a video recorder, was to point the nearest child at it. Similarly, my children can already type faster and more accurately than I was able to at their age... and if I weren't in the IT industry, they would almost certainly be more computer-literate than me in every respect, instead of just in some.

But is that true across the board? Are we bringing up a generation of children who are not just computer literate, but "PII literate" (Personally Identifiable Information)? There's been some research recently, but the picture it paints is confusing. For instance, children and their parents express different views about whether the children have been set rules to guide their online behaviour (two thirds of parents assert that they have, while only half the children concur).

Anecdotally, young people these days are more comfortable with the notion of having multiple online personas - though (equally anecdotally) that most often takes the form of discarding one account and starting a new one, rather than maintaining multiple concurrent accounts specifically to achieve some kind of social 'watertight compartments'. The present article cites Dana [sic] Boyd's 2007 paper  "Why Youth <3 Social Network Sites" as noting that some teenage users were entering false name/location details, restricting access, or setting up multiple social networking pages... not to protect against strangers, but to maintain a space from which their parents were excluded.

Ofcom's director of market research is quoted as saying that "people put aside concerns about privacy and safety believing they have been taken care of by someone else". I suspect this applies in several ways:

- children perhaps assume that their parents wouldn't knowingly let them do something unsafe;

- parents perhaps assume their children wouldn't do something foolish;

- both perhaps assume that social networking sites wouldn't either deliberately abuse their PII, or make the default disclosure settings inappropriately lax.

I suspect it's simply not enough to warn children of the risks of disclosing too much personal data online; there are too many factors which will outweigh the advice:

- it comes from a stuffy old parent, who doesn't even know what Facebook is, and doesn't have any friends anyway (cause or effect...? You figure it out, old-timer...)

- the risks which may arise from over-disclosure are probably remote in the imagination of the user

- 'this is my private space with my friends, so we can do what we want here'.

In other words, we're almost certainly not currently creating a generation of PII-literate data subjects - only adverse experience is likely to do that.