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House of Commons data debate 12 November

This House of commons debate is quite fresh being dated 12 November 2008

I follow UK blogs and Irish blogs. A few click away from a regular UK site I read I fount the following.

Want to have your say in a house of commons debate on data management? The one I am following deals specifically with not alone the Governments handling of data but their subsequent handling of the situation arising from handling data badly. The opposition may have ulterior motives but this aside they are good at voicing public concern when it suits.

You can have a read and even join in this house of Commons data debate. You can even have your say. If your comment picks up enough following you may even end up influencing Government action. OK, that may be unlikely but is a possibility. Your post could at least tutor the opposition.

This is a far cry from watching the Irish Government dillydally late at night and hours after the event with one way communications only. Maybe someone will post explaining that a similar Irish service is running. That would be nice.

All in all, the UK Government are being forced to take data (privacy, responsibility and legislation) seriously and this has to be a good thing.

Some of the comments on the theyworkforyou site are also quite good and demonstrate a keen insight in to the importance of data management by the British public.

The participants (mostly male) can be bitchy but with a surprising amount of hidden and readily available ammunition. David Heathcoat-Amory hits hard. Not the type of man you want outside the tent shouting in. Being a conservative he is about as far outside the tent as people have wanted the conservatives for quite some time. So, enlighten me. What Irish service along these lines have I been missing?

I follow a few Irish politics sites and the Authors on twitter and despite a high standard I don’t know of anything with the time or resource to run at this standard.

Global credit crisis set to herald increase in web crime.

David Whitelegg explained to us during his “Who’s who in data” interview that security is a process, not a product. This is borne out in the fact that “there are never ever any guarantees in security”. 

The crux of this is that the process of security involves identifying risks and reducing them and then continually repeating the process to account for local and global technology changes.

In essence, there are always opportunities for cyber criminals but just like the traditional house breaker, the cyber criminal will cherry pick based on his own assessment or risk to reward. 

The credit crisis puts pressure on us all. Cyber criminals too will feel the heat and may increase the level of their own risk. This may involve them revisiting security weaknesses they previously identified but felt too hot to handle.

The upshot of all of this is that in an environment in which companies may have less budget for everything including I.T. security, the risk of infringement will increase. Smart management will be very cautious about reducing security expenditure but even this is a long way from increasing protection investment in an era when it is very much required.

If you are looking for a UK I.T. security expert you can contact David Whitelegg directly. In addition, he provides informative articles on his I.T. security focused blog. Should David be unavailable you can be assured that any direction he points you in is conducive to furthering your data privacy protection.

Google is undoubtedly one of the most innovative companies in the world. This is to be condoned. Innovation is the backbone of invention and embodies the entrepreneurial spirit in it’s most admirable light. Privacy however is of the utmost importance to the continuity of the comfort of the human condition. So, where is the conflict between innovation and privacy?

A quote from http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/another-step-to-protect-user-privacy.html reads “we were trying to strike the right balance between sometimes conflicting factors like privacy, security, and innovation.”

So, taking privacy, security and innovation as the three factors and removing privacy as our factor of concern here, this leaves only security and innovation to conflict with privacy. In a state of emergency, privacy and security could be conflicting factors as a state strips citizens of privacy so as to avail of all personal information and increase security. I am quite sure that Google has no role or plans in this area. 

Therefore I can only conclude that Google “sometimes” sees privacy as a conflicting factor of innovation. To be fair, on a very broad level we can all understand that information is an essential tool where innovation is concerned. Most companies however (particularly successful ones) are very keen to stay on the moderate side of privacy expectations and can paradoxically use innovation to make up for any shortfall of desired information when inventing, coding, writing, building or improving. 

What is Googles’ fixation on expanding the amount of information it has access to. Google as an institution has more information than most (”most” being a serious understatement) commercial enterprises and therefore has a very serious competitive advantage with regard to information as one of the raw materials of innovation. As an obviousness, information is not innovation. Information is material. Innovation is a process requiring very competitive human spirit. Google would appear to be overly obsessed with one of the raw materials which can be used in the process of innovation.

The problem here is that information as a raw material belongs to us all and legislation governing it’s use is nether clear nor strong enough to offer protection to the individual or a decisive road-map to companies using information. 

The EU needs to invest, study and legislate. Only then can they tell organisations to comply. Vague expectations can only lead to misunderstanding, complicated litigation and disappointment at all levels. The EU has long held the undeserved name as the protectors of data. This many believe is however only as a result of strong legislation in very clear circumstances. Most data privacy issues remain complicated and these need to be broken down. Data legislation needs to offer protection to the individual, followable and usable rules for business, clear law for the judiciary and overall fairness which can be enforced without fear, favour or injustice. This may be a utopia but while me may never get there, we need to get a lot closer.