Back to the future?

One of the “joys” of getting older is the realisation that nothing is ever really new and that almost everything that happens is bound to come round again in your lifetime. The contribution of networked technology to this time-honoured process seems to be the speed with which, these days, history repeats itself. At the same time when the average person’s memory and attention span seems to be contracting due to the overload of information to which we are all exposed, fashions - of the clothing and political type - seem to be coming full circle more quickly than ever before.

While Matron could go on about the way in which our current government seems to be obsessed with re-enacting the 80s (Royal Wedding, check; riots in the streets, check; sending visible "goodwill" in the form of aircraft carriers to small islands near South America, check), or about the horror she feels when mint green dungarees are staring her in the face from the pages of the Observer off a Sunday morning, her most recent deja vu actually stems from something closer to her own heart. Namely, the outrage caused a few weeks ago by the governments “new” proposals for extending the police and security service’ powers to carry out surveillance of electronic communications.

Snappily dubbed the Communications Capabilities Development Programme (CCDP), it proposes – in a nutshell – the expansion of existing requirements for the retention of, and access to, communications data to data generated by social media services and others. As well informed observers and privacy obsessives of any kind quickly noted, there are uncanny similarities between this project and Labour’s doomed “Interception Modernisation Programme” which had to be dumped in 2009 in the face of mounting opposition, mounting costs and an increased understanding even by politicians that the technical difficulties that developers would have to overcome would not be would not be conquered any time soon. However, what the security services want, the security services eventually get, so Matron knows very few people who were really surprised when this particular ball was fetched from its hiding place in the long grass and kicked back into play.

As those who know Matron in the flesh are aware, when stories like these break, she tends to express a desire to move to a wood cabin in the Outer Hebrides, armed only with a sawn-off shotgun and a box full of beans. It was therefore not without a certain irony that the sofa in the holiday cottage where she watched the news reports about the CCDP had a view of the Western Isles. Alas, holidays end, and it’s still bl**dy cold up there in Northern Scotland, so until it warms up a bit, Matron has opted for adding her two cents’ worth.

There is very little to be said about the CCDP that has not already been said on ORG’s most excellent wiki on the subject. Others, like Paul Bernal, have analysed the likely attitudes of the UK political parties to renewed endeavours to push through this massive expansion of surveillance. Within a UK context, both sides are busy preparing for yet another big fight and the sound of sharpening knives on Matron’s Twitter feed is almost palpable.

Matron has no idea whether this (Coalition) government stands any realistic chance of getting a law adopted that managed to defeat the previous government while it had a substantial majority. She has to admit that she is not quite so pessimistic about this as Paul Bernal, who thinks that all three parties have good reasons to vote this through. Agreed, it will take a good hard fight to prevent it, long nights spent burning the midnight oil, hours of fruitless discussions and the likely disillusionment of yet another generation of campaigners for a free and open internet. However, the crux of the matter lies in the level of attention that this proposal currently attracts. And on that count, at least, the opponents have a slight advantage as tech and law journalists seem to choose to give this matter prominence. This may even be one of the increasingly rare cases where good journalism (rather than the kind that works off the press release) prevails.

However, what if we win this? Then what? Will that stop the government – and more importantly the security services – from craving the “precious”? Will it heck. And this is where Matron thinks that we could all do with revisiting history in an attempt to prevent its repeat. In particular, the CCDP should by no means be seen solely as a UK legislative project but should be put in context of developments currently going on at European level.

Connecting the dots

As many readers will be aware, the UK government is not the only actor currently on stage pensively staring at a skull. The DG Home of the European Commission is at this very moment engaged in an impact assessment of whether or not changes should be made to the EU Data Retention Directive and what, if any, those changes should be.

The Directive was pushed through the EU legislative process – almost as an emergency measure – in late 2005 on the basis of shortcuts, backroom deals and a blatant disregard for both popular opinion and fundamental human rights. Since then, the Directive and the national laws trying to implement it have encountered numerous hurdles in the form of constitutional court judgements questioning their compatibility with the right to privacy, national parliaments refusing to transpose all or part of the Directive and a more or less obstructive tech industry. What was meant to be adopted as a harmonising measure has led to some of the most fractured legal environment ever and one that is now actively threatening to impact on the online industry.

Matron has commented on these developments several times already, but with the CCDP now on the horizon, more needs to be said:

Timing

First, the timing of the publication of the CCDP proposals (the official "official announcement" is still expected for the Queen's Speech in May) is unlikely to be a coincidence. If, as rumour still has it, the EU Commission is going to adopt a proposal for a revised Data Retention Directive as early as September of this year, the CCDP could, and should, be seen as the UK both drawing a line in the sand early and setting out their shopping list.

As many others will remember, last time round, the Labour government - having already legislated for wide-ranging access provisions in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 - battled to get a mandatory communications data retention requirement adopted in the UK against considerable resistance by ISPs, the Lords and the media for almost four years before they quietly policy-laundered the whole shebang in Brussels.

The advantages of this approach are clear: the British media is notoriously focused on what is going on in Westminster and almost pathologically averse to reporting anything that happens in Brussels unless it is about something like the bad Europeans dictating the shape of “our” bananas. This may therefore well happen again.

Choice of options

Secondly, the Commission has allegedly already commissioned a study as part of its impact assessment for a revised DR Directive. Among the options said to be under consideration for a revised Directive is the option of "expanding the collection of communications data". This does not bode well. Although most of us will be hoping that the review will give effect to the various constitutional court decisions across the EU that criticised the current Directive, it is always dangerous to untie a legislative bundle. Stuff happens!

This makes it even more important that we finally get an ECJ decision on the Irish High Court reference which raises the human rights implications of the existing DR laws. Fortunately, it seems as if the High Court has now finally come out of its hiatus and made the reference in January. But given the ECJ timetable, this may yet be too late.

Political will and power

Thirdly, the hard core of opposition to the DR Directive, both within and outwith the political classes, currently comes from Germany, which is also - as we are frequently reminded - the EU's biggest economy and the member state (bar possibly Austria) with the biggest privacy chip on their shoulder. It is therefore likely that the German position on this – in the European Parliament and the Council – will be of the utmost importance when this is going to be decided.

Much of the political resistance rests on the shoulders of Justice Minister Leutheuser-Schnarrenberger, a declared opponent of DR who was one of the claimants in the by now famous German constitutional court challenge before her party joined the German coalition government, but who, to her credit, has continued to man the barricades after she was appointed to her current job. Alas, she is a Liberal Democrat MP and although Matron has not lived in the country for years, from what her German friends tell her, the German Lib Dem's chances of getting enough votes to even get back into the Bundestag come the next German election (October 2013) are as slim, if not slimmer, as those of their British counterparts. Word on the street has it, they may even go the way of the dodo.

While one should never pay too much homage to the power of one single person to change the ways of the world, one should also not underestimate the problems their absence can cause. Once Leutheuser-Schnarrenberger is gone, German political resistance to DR is likely mellow considerably. There is, of course, that constitutional court decision, but that will not protect us against the collection of new traffic data, it will merely provide an upper limit for retention periods and access safeguards - in Germany, not the UK!

Timing revisited

Similarly, if the speed with which the last DR Directive was pushed through is anything to go by, the final discussions/negotiations of a revised Directive may actually coincide with both the looming end of Commissioner Malstroem's period in office and the next European Parliament elections (summer/autumn 2014).

That is never a good thing as it tends to lead to "fire sales" in the corridors of power in Brussels. We've seen this with the Telecoms Package (where, oddly enough, it worked partly in our favour) and Commission employees Matron spoke to in Brussels in January already voiced this as a concern with regard to the new Data Protection Regulation which may face a similar challenge. So this is something that we need to bear in mind from a campaigning point of view.

Overall, it is therefore most important to remember that regardless of any political wrangling that we will have to go through in the UK (and it goes without saying that we should oppose this harebrained threat to civil liberty strenuously), we should bear in mind that with a reasonably vigilant British press, the House of Lords, loud-mouthed voters and stubborn, cost-averse ISPs, the government's chances of getting anything substantial past the UK Parliament are infinitely slimmer than their chances of "outsourcing" this to the EU in what may well turn out to be a parallel legislative process.

What is more, from a political point of view, the latter is a win-win. If loose here, but are successful in Brussels, they can then come back to Westminster with hangdog eyes and say, "So sorry, chaps, but we have to implement this now, Brussels told us so".

This may make Matron sound like a cynical and disillusioned old hag, but her guess would be that there is a plan to this effect somewhere in a drawer in Whitehall, even if it is marked "Plan B". The Home Office and the security services are used to playing the long game. The fact that those involved in the pushback will be roughly the same people (at civil society level) who are also going to be engaged in fighting on several other fronts (including trying to get a decent version of the Data Protection Regulation adopted) at roughly the same time, is not helping matters either. Most human brains only have so much capacity.

So nipping this in the bud over here would be great, but it won't be enough. We need more brains, we need a wider horizon and we need to build alliances in the EU on this and quickly. For that we need individuals in the UK (including lawyers, techies, journalists, campaigners) willing to spend some time and to get their head around rather complicated technologies, legal frameworks, lobbying strategies and political tactics.

On Thursday, 19 April, the good folks at Privacy International, ORG, fipr and the LSE are organising a workshop called “Scrambling for Safety” where many of these issues will be discussed. The line-up is stellar and the need to cooperate is clear. If you are at all interested in becoming involved please register here or follow it on Twitter (#sfs2012).

Matron may even see you there.

Pastoral letter from an average lesbian to the leaders of the Catholic church

Matron initially wrote the text below as a comment on one of the many blogposts by faithful Catholics that are currently promoting the "pastoral letter" written by Archbishop Vincent Nichols and Archbishop Peter Smith on ‘gay marriage'.

As Matron has already said many a time in various fora, she is no great fan of gay marriage herself because she is no great fan of marriage. As an indoctrinated 80s feminist who grew up on a steady diet of philosophical and legal critique of the institution, she has never quite managed to overcome her resistance to a concept whose sole purpose it seems to be to privilege one way of arranging one's life over another. To her, marriage itself already always seemed to be the epitome of something that creates inequality in a society and she still wonders if gay people who want to be part of it might not maybe be selling those of us who don't down the river to some extent.

For this reason gay marriage is something that Matron has consistently refused to campaign on all her gay, adult life, preferring instead to argue for a society and a legal system where people's life choices in all their rainbow coloured variety are recognised and protected by law. She stands by that even in the face of pressure from her own community because, quite frankly, it seems a bit silly to be for something just because the Catholic church is against it.

However, it cannot be denied that:

(a) there is of course a ludicrous element of inequality in the denial of marriage to one part of society solely on the basis of the gender of the person they love,

(b) the conflation of romantic notions of love, societal objectives, religious dogma, and the law has created a myriad of messy beliefs and understandings of what marriage is and should be about, and

(c) - as the Catholic church has done - the throwing into this unholy mess of argument the imperative of marriage being solely there to enable procreation and the raising of children adds a level of irrationality and - lets face it - entertainment value to the debate that deserves its entirely separate blog post, seeing as it also seems to deny the right to marry to those straight couples who cannot have children or who definitely and freely decide not to have them.

Much has been said and argued on that latter part in particular and many examples have been cited for loving gay relationships where children are nourished, loved and cared for, versus incapable single mothers, despicable rogues of fathers, broken homes and, not least, the Catholic church's abysmal reaction to the fact of child abuse by members of its own ranks. Indeed, Matron, like almost everyone of her ilk, now has gay and lesbian friends who raise children, including a lesbian couple who is providing that loving home for a group of three siblings given up for adoption by social services after suffering physical and psychological abuse at the hands of their heterosexual parents.

But equally, Matron knows of gay and lesbian relationship breakdowns, with or without children, where the partners had to deal with exactly the same social, emotional and legal issues as their straight counterparts. The bottom line is that we are no better and no worse at this relationship and raising children thing than straights have been for millennia. Nor should we be expected to be and Matron does not believe that a "holier than though" attitude is going to help anyone even one iota.

But what she does believe is that the discourse that is currently being had openly on the letters pages of our national newspapers, blogs and social networks is deeply offensive and hurtful, showing as it does to those of us who might just have thought that this society is changing for the better and might be becoming more tolerant, what a morass of hate and prejudice still lurks beneath the surface. To this extent it is not only damaging to individuals' mental health and self esteem but it is damaging to the very fabric of our society.

And for a church that professes to have as its major tenet the commandment to "love thy neighbour" there is remarkably little of that love shown to any neighbour who doesn't play by its own restrictive, narrow-minded and, yes, openly discriminatory rules. So even if Matron could bring herself to have faith in some spiritual superior being for whose existence there is not a shred of scientific evidence, she would never be able to believe in a god this spiteful and a church this hellbent (pardon the pun) on the exclusion and damnation of significant parts of his creation. That sort of god is not a loving god, no matter what his minions preach from their pulpits of a Sunday morning.

"Sticks and stones", one could of course argue and, on the plus side, Matron has also received many messages of support from straight friends, family and acquaintences that make it clear that things are not all bad. But the sticks and stones argument never really works very well for those of us with thinner skins and for Matron this week there was the added complication that she was actually required to attend a full Catholic mass at a time when the only reason why she would ever want to go near a Catholic church would be to picket it.

So here is the comment that she posted on that other blog in which she describes just how that made her feel. It's a bit more private and personal that her usual ramblings and she will no doubt regret posting it later, but for the time being she thinks that there isn't enough out there yet about this aspect of the whole debate:

"Yesterday, I was glad enough to be there for my lesbian partner when we attended the catholic funeral mass for her grandmother, a woman who, aged 85 at the time, welcomed me into her heart and her family 17 years ago when my girlfriend and I first started going out. Walking behind the coffin into the church together with the rest of the family we had to go past a table with a neat pile of your “pastoral letters” and, next to it, a petition on the matter, signed no doubt by many of the parishioners who were sitting in the pews waiting for us to pass.

It made it clear to me once more that although everyone in my partner’s family treats me as a fully signed up member of their clan, the same way in fact, as they treat the spouses of my partner’s siblings, the church they belong to continues to see me as a second class citizen regardless of how much time, love and committment I share with their daughter, how much I get involved in their gatherings, the care for their children and their elderly. Whatever I do and however much love I show towards my partner and those she holds dear, in the eyes of their church I will never be good enough.

I am not sure, if any of those who are promoting this letter have the capacity to understand how much hurt and offence you are causing to those of us who, although we may not be religious, try to live a life in which we do the right things, love those dear to us without constraints and in return only want to get shown the same love and respect for these efforts as everybody else.

Whatever you think about marriage and the rationale for it, the public discourse church leaders are currently creating, the comparisons they are making between what, in my and most other cases, are supportive, loving and committed relationships between two (not three, four or five) people and things like bestiality and legalising slavery etc. are homophobic and show none of the love towards your fellow creature that your own church’s founder commands.

Given everything I read in the papers in recent weeks, it took all I’ve got for me to decide to even go near a Catholic church yesterday. I did it because the woman I love needed my support and because I know the woman we were burying would have wanted me to be there. Which part of that love that we share is so lacking in the necessary quality that it doesn’t make the grade in your book? If an 85 year old Irish catholic woman could accept my relationship with her granddaughter, why can’t her church?"

[Update: on the other blog, a nice Christian gentleman has now replied to my comment to tell me that my relationship "ontologically damages me". But fear not, Jesus loves all the gays and only has their happiness at heart. And according to an article to which I was kindly directed, it is my lifestyle itself, and not the discriminatory treatment by society, that makes me miserable because

"[t]he ultimate misery of homosexuality is, in fact, what every longitudinal study reveals. An active homosexual life most often results in shortened life span, prevalence of disease, drug and alcohol abuse, and relationships that are brief and emotionally hurtful, with little hope of fidelity, and a high occurrence of violent abuse. The chances of a person committing suicide are also greatly increased."

There's clearly no way of responding to this "Through the looking glass" logic" without making oneself even more miserable, so we shall leave it here.]

Rating rape

And now for something completely different...

Over the last few days, Matron has watched the unfolding of What could become a new campaign on Twitter with an increasing sense of discomfort. Calling itself the 58% campaign, it is seemingly trying to encourage women not to be deterred from reporting a rape or other sexual assault to the police because of low conviction rates.

The figure bandied about in the popular press and various studies in this regard is 6%. That is the percentage of cases where a conviction for rape is secured compared to the total number of cases reported to the police. Not so, argues the campaign, pointing out that this figure misrepresents the situation because rape is the only crime where conviction rates are calculated in this way. In all other crimes, the term "conviction rate" refers to the rate of convictions compared to the number of cases brought to trial while the rate of comparison between reported cases and convictions is called "attrition rate". Using the former method, so the campaign argues, the rape conviction rate is actually 58%, much higher than in relation to many other types of offences.

As Matron said, the campaign seems to mean well, seeing as it is trying to encourage women to report rape cases by telling them that they are in no more danger of having their attacker go unpunished than are many other victims of crime. However, from a psychological point of view, this campaign misses a few major points.

First and foremost, most women will probably agree that when it comes to evaluating whether the prospect of putting oneself through the ordeal of reporting a sexual assault (and for most victims it will be an ordeal) is worth the potential outcome, they will not really care at what stage in the proceedings their case fails. One of the most recent studies on attrition in rape cases (dated from 2005) identifies no fewer than 6 attrition points between reporting a crime and eventual conviction:

1. The victim's decision whether or not to report in the first place
2. The police's decision whether or not there is any evidence of assault or whether they are faced with a false allegation
3. The police's decision whether or not the evidence is sufficient for charges to be brought
4. The victim's decision to withdraw the accusation for whatever reason (which includes becoming aware of the practical consequences for them of seeing the case through to trial)
5. The CPS' decision of whether or not to bring the case to court
6. The court's decision whether or not to convict

If we disregard the first attrition point, that is five separate instances during which a victim will be faced with the prospect of "it all having been in vain". Five separate occasions for regret. Five separate opportunities for having additional psychological damage inflicted upon you on top of the trauma of the original offence.

Even more interestingly, all the studies that have been carried out in this area confirm "that the highest proportion of cases is lost at the earliest stages, with between half and two-thirds dropping out before referral to prosecutors". Now that is undoubtedly true for almost all criminal offences, but nonetheless Matron would be interested to see how those figures compare to rates of attrition between the reporting and the prosecution stage in relation to other crimes. If the percentage of "lost cases" is substantially higher with regard to rape and sexual assault than in respect of other crimes, this might actually also explain a slightly higher conviction rate for rape (ie, many of the main hurdles might already have been jumped in the pre-trial stages).

Given those circumstances, however, victims (and Matron includes all genders in this argument) might be forgiven if, in the case of rape, they are looking at the attrition rate rather than the actual conviction rate. In fact, encouraging women to report on the basis of an assumption that they have a good chance to have their attacker convicted might be paramount to gross misrepresentation given the 6% figure. And yes, it might be fact that the conviction rate for rape is higher than, say, for burglary. But no victim of burglary will be required to expose themselves to quite such as extent in the context of holding the offender to account, so we would be comparing the proverbial apples and pears, if we relied on that argument.

Make no mistake, Matron is all for encouraging women to report. Not ever having been a victim of any form of sexual assault, she sincerely hopes a) that it will stay that way and b) that she would have the courage to do that if it ever happened to her. But she does not kid herself that she would definitely report it, if it ever happened. You just can't know how you would react until you are in that situation yourself. Of course, increasing reporting rates is important. Until we have the real figures, the question of rape and sexual assault will never get the attention it deserves and the public perception that women are doing it in droves "to get one over a man they have some beef with with" will remain in place. But there are other ways to achieve this, most importantly by improving the way in which victims are treated by the police and the justice system. That's what people have focused on for the last decade or so and, in Matron's view, rightly so.

This campaign, on the other hand, runs the risk of doing more damage that good, not only because it may depict the actual reality of trying prosecute a rape case (and particularly what this means for the victim) in an unrealistically favourable light, but also because it suggests to the general public that our criminal justice system "works just fine" with regard to rape or at least no worse than in relation to any other crime. That's not the case yet for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that in order to reflect the additional trauma victims go through by virtue of the prosecution process alone, we should really be aiming for pre-trial attrition rates that are way below those of other crimes. Only then would the majority of victims be reassured that they and their case will be taken seriously and that they are not putting themselves through all this for nothing.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. So please, honourable campaigners, do your homework. Read a few studies, crunch a few numbers and speak to a few rape victims before you embark on this crusade and, above all, don't diss the use of the attrition rate without understanding what it stands for in these cases.

To Google-bash or not to Google-bash?

After months of work-induced hiatus, Matron has recently started tentatively to participate in life outside the ivory tower again. Among other things, this means that she has started to follow some of the discussions that are currently going on various "conspiracy-lists" of which she is a member. On one of those list, a very interesting question has just arisen with regard to Google's recent move to unify the privacy policy of its various services.

As many of Matron's readers will know, the EU's Article 29 Working Party has called on Google to agree to a "pause" with regard to the introduction of the new policy to give regulators across Europe the chance to review whether the new policy complies with EU data protection law. Google has so far rejected this request, pointing out that it has run the new policy by some (though admittedly not all) of the EU regulators already and that it sees no reason for further delay. It also seems convinced that the new policy does in fact comply with the law.

The Working Party is not so sure and the French data protection authority CNIL has now sent a second letter to Google on behalf of the Working Party in which it sets out its particular issues. A US-EU consumer rights organisation, the Trans-Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD), has sided with the Working Party and written its own letter to Google CEO, Larry Page.

At the heart of the matter are concerns about

1. a lack of transparency of the new policy and


2. the allegation that Google may has given itself a right to combine personal data collected across all of its services that it did not have before. In particular, CNIL's preliminary investigations seem to show that it is difficult to know exactly which data is being combined between which services and for which purposes.

Never one to rely on the allegations made by others, Matron thought she might have a look and compare the new privacy policy with the last version before that (from October 2011). And indeed, there are some things that the average privacy advocate could take umbrage with.

Combination of data across services

Back in October 2011, Google's policy said:

"We may combine the information that you submit under your account with information from other Google services or third parties in order to provide you with a better experience and to improve the quality of our services. For certain services, we may give you the opportunity to opt out of combining such information."

The new policy reads:

"We may combine personal information from one service with information, including personal information, from other Google services – for example, to make it easier to share things with people you know."

To Matron the main two differences seem to be that:

• under the older version combining data across service was allowed for the specific purpose of "providing you with a better experience and to improve service quality".



• under the old policy, users were given the opportunity to opt out of having their data combined for certain services. That opt-out right now seems to have been removed across the board.

As far as the right to combine data is concerned, Matron has used this kind of wording herself many a time when drafting privacy policies for her clients. It is specifically designed to cover a wide range of processing activities, and in Google's case one could probably think of anything from improvements to the search algorithm to targeted advertising and personalisation. It was therefore a pretty wide-ranging right already and maybe we shouldn't get our knickers in a twist about this given that no one seems to have complained so far.

However, the old policy did at least tie the right to combine data to some kind of specified purpose, albeit a big and expansive one. Under the new policy, Google seems to have removed any purpose restriction whatsoever and just given itself the right to combine whatever data it holds about us as it sees fit. As a data protection lawyer, Matron would have to agree with CNIL, that that is at least questionable under EU data protection law which only allows for personal data to be processed (and combining is an act of processing) for specified purposes.

Also, in practical terms it would certainly suggest that Google is now doing something (or planning to do, or at the very least give themselves the option to do, something in the near future) that it wasn't doing before. Why else go to this length? As always, we could of course blame incompetence before looking for bad intent, but Google must be able to afford some of the best data protection lawyers in Europe, so maybe we can rule that out.

As for removing the users' right to object to the combining of their data, this is quite an important change and one whose repercussions we cannot yet really assess. For Matron personally, this means, for example, that Google may now technically be permitted to combine the data it collects about her via this blog (which one of it's subsidiaries hosts) with her search history. Because when registering with Blogger, Matron used an e-mail address that includes her real name (more fool her, many of her techie friends will say, but probably something that many other average users would have done as well) and given that this is the same e-mail address she used when opening a Google account, Google as a group of companies (not just as one or two of its subsidiaries) now knows the real name of the person who writes a formerly relatively pseudonymous blog (for Matron's feelings about this sort of thing, see here).

The question is, of course, how long it may now take until Google finds a creative use for all this combined data? For example, how long until a Google search for Matron's real name brings up this blog in the search results? Google may say that it has no plans to do this and be quite right at this point in time. But stranger things have happened at sea and on Facebook than an online provider changing its mind, business model or algorithm. They point is that it now can.

Transparency

Also, and this seems to be the main point of CNIL/WP29 criticism, it could justifiably be said that the new policy has indeed become a lot less transparent for the average user. This is because Google has now basically put up two big buckets:

• In bucket A are all the types of data Google may collect from users of any of its services.



• In bucket B are all the purposes for which Google may process personal data.

The new policy is basically construed in a way that allows Google to process any type of data from bucket A for any purpose from bucket B.

Given that in the EU data controllers are under an obligation to tell data subjects specifically in each case what type of data they are processing for what purpose, Google's approach is probably not enough to fulfil its obligation to provide data subjects with the required "fair processing information" as it's know in the trade.

Given also, that Google is likely to justify its processing activities on the basis of the user consent that it implies through the new privacy policy, users must be able to understand properly what it is that they are consenting to for the consent to be valid. And therein, as they say, lies the rub.

The "conspiracy list" on which this discussion arose consists of around 25 people, learned men and woman all, with backgrounds and tertiary degrees in law, IT, politics and many other cognate areas. After several rounds in the ring, members seemed to be unable to agree on what the new policy actually means. If it is ambiguous enough so that this type of user can't figure it out, the "normal" Internet user (as in most of Matron's examples consisting of a sample n=2, being Matron's and Pangloss' mothers) stand no chance. So, Matron can't help agreeing with CNIL that on the facts, at the very least, the latest development in Googleland warrants closer inspection and maybe the requested "pause".

To Google bash?

However, for Matron the most interesting and most frustrating aspect of the discussion on her list was not whether or not Google's latest peccadillo was of sufficient quality to finally taint the "don't be evil" image, but whether or not we, as a group of critical individuals, should be drawn into this affair (and a number of other affairs which involve Google, like, for example, the issues with the security gap in the Safari browser's cookie preferences) in the first place.

The reasons given for "not jumping on the Google-fear bandwagon" went along the following lines:

• We shouldn't get caught up in a campaign to "take down Google", that was effectively organised and financed by a group of competitors.



• There are other organisations who do the same or worse and so we need to be even-handed in our criticism.



• We should focus on the principles and not on individual companies and single cases.



• We should stick to our work and avoid chasing headlines.

None of this is easy to argue against, and yet the fact that we had this discussion in the first place and that we had it (it felt like) because this concerned one of the tech community's beloved darlings, left a bad taste in Matron's mouth.

That very same group of people has in the past both co-operated with and criticised companies, institutions and organisations like BT, Microsoft, Virgin Media, Phorm, the Information Commissioner's Office, the Home Office, the European Commission, O2, the UK security services, several rightsholders and their associations and even Apple (until recently another "Untouchable") without having had similar discussions about whether or not we should "single them out" for their transgressions. So why was this different?

And even if in this case Google's approach is specifically selected for criticism and comment, is this really so unjustified? If a country like, say, the US were to start violating certain human rights - lets assume for a moment that one day they may decide to detain certain undesirable individuals in prisons without a fair trial for an indefinite period of time - would we really bellyache about whether or not we can criticise the US for that just because any number of tin pot dictators all over the world have done the same for decades without us making a big deal about it?

Contrary to all the constant affirmation given to men by women all around the globe, size does matter. Reach matters. And relative and absolute power matters. If a big and powerful country like the US does something that flies in the face of a general feeling of what is right or wrong, this does two things:

• its actions alone are likely to affect a massively larger number of people than the actions of smaller, less powerful countries.



• its actions set a standard that other, smaller and less powerful players will adopt as soon as they get the chance.

It used to be said that if the US sneezes, the world catches a cold. On the internet, it seems - to Matron at least - that the same now applies to Google and a handful of other players. Those are the companies with the money, know how and lobbying power to shape both the technology we will be using in the future and to influence the way in which that technology will be regulated. Those are the companies that - everyday - test the boundaries of what users, competitors and regulators will allow them to get away with (see also Facebook for the "two steps ahead, one step back" approach to user conditioning). And once these companies have established the new "normal" and made it part of their established business model, others will follow.

The only way to counteract this, is for those of us with the relevant skills to pick them up on any transgressions as and when they happen. We must do this by analysing their actions; by bringing any unlawfulness to the public's and the regulators' attention; by working with regulators and other stakeholders in relation to enforcement and by trying to shape policy designed to address and/or prevent future transgressions.

And at no point in this process should we ever ask ourselves, "Should we be doing this because it could be construed as Google (or Apple, or Microsoft) bashing?"

Just saying...

Of mice and elephants

As those who know her may have noticed, Matron has been severely overworked and underplayed for the last six months. So much so, that she was beginning to wonder herself what on Earth would have to happen to make her blog again. Having blissfully ignored all manner of exciting and infuriating developments ranging from Hacking enquiries to calls for the re-introduction of capital punishment (it turns out that all that needs to said about these, can be said on Twitter - although that may, in the end, apply to everything, really), the rioting on UK streets proves to be the straw the breaks the camel's writer's block or some such thing.

Because a lot has been written on this by all and sundry already (most interestingly Michael White in the Guardian on the blame games that have now commenced, David Allen Green in his New Statesman blog on the need to keep the riots in proportion and the entertaining comments of bloggers everywhere on Boris Johnson's - of all people - suggestion that the riots are to blame on an excessive sense of entitlement) Matron will try (most likely unsuccessfully) to keep it to a brief soul searching operation. Two thoughts strike her in the midst of all this.

First, the description of the tactics employed by rioters in their endeavours to redistribute private property and the tactics of the police used to prevent such redistribution puts her in mind of the "mice and elephants" analogy Swine made when he described the changes the internet underwent over the last 15 years. Swine said that in the olden days, the internet, and access to it, was controlled by a few big players which were easy to regulate and could act as gatekeepers. They were, to all intends and purposes, elephants, slow moving and relying on their size. However, in the current era of social media and user generated content, internet users and the platforms that allow them to interact with each other, are like mice. The can pop up and under at a moment's notice, react quickly to events and dissipate when they are threatened.

To matron, this model seems to apply both to the way rioters used social media to organise themselves these past few days and to the actual way in which they operated on the streets. Reports from Manchester describe the way in which groups of young people (Matron really, really loathes the word "youths") played a game of cat and mouse with the police in that they broke the window of one particular shop, scarpered when the police arrived on that site, then created a distraction at another location and quietly returned to the site of the original offence to clear out the shop while the police were patrolling the second site. They may be disaffected, but they ain't stupid.

Which brings us to the question of what can be done in these cases and whether anything can be done, really. At which point Matron is getting very impatient with all the politicians' posturing about criminality v protest, strong enforcement and/or the moral vacuum that prevails in this country. Because, all discussions of morality aside, what these event show most clearly is that no state other than a completely authoritarian or totalitarian one, can control all parts of its population against its wishes for long. We can put 16,000 elephants on the streets of London for a time but this will become unsustainable eventually at which point cries for more efficient - and by their nature more oppressive - measures will be aired (and yes, Matron knows, those calls are being made already, but she chooses to ignore things like this YouGov poll - particularly the bit about using live ammunition - for the time being, for her own sanity).

All of which means that those of us who do not want to live in a police state where security forces are given ever increasing powers that they will then have the right - lets not forget that for a moment - to use on the rest of us, really have no alternative to at least trying to understand the underlying reasons for why this situation could get out of hand so badly so quickly. If we do not want to counter force with sheer force (like deploying the army in domestic conflict, which for someone like Matron who comes from a country where there is still a constitutional ban on that type of thing - for good historical reasons) or submit to a level of surveillance - online and offline - never before encountered in a free society, what else can we do?

The second thought that occurred to Matron as she was sitting on a train from all-quiet-now London to just-about-to-kick-off Manchester last night, was that, like it or not, it really does make a difference if it happens close to you or to your own. Like in 1999, when the activities of nail bomber David Copeland really only hit home when he targeted the Admiral Duncan pub in gay Soho. Like in July 2005 when the much publicised photo of a destroyed number 26 London bus was the most disturbing of all images because this was the line that Matron had taken to get home for more than four years.

So when watching the reports on the London riots on TV on Monday night or listening to the updates fellow-travellers got from friends and family in Manchester on the train last night, it was the events in Mare Street in Hackney, which is close to were she had lived way back when, and the news of the destruction of the Manchester shops she frequents now, that touched her most.

So, eat your liberal heart out, she is as shocked as the next person about what happened. Which is why - like many another bleeding-heart Guardian reader - she currently starts her sentences with the prefix "this is not an excuse, but may explain things". Because in all honesty, there can be no excuse for the gangs of rampaging bullies she and Mrs Matron passed on their way home last night. And bullies they are, no matter how you look at it.

But - as has been explained to Matron patiently on many occasions by said Missus (who holds a PGCE no less and is experienced in all matters pedagogical) - most bullies have been bullied themselves. And therein, as they say, lies the rub.

When the UK map of child poverty was posted a while back, Matron found to her entertainment (but not surprise) that three of the four places of residence she ever held in the UK (Toxteth in Liverpool, Hackney in London and Cheetham Hill in Manchester) were in areas where more than 50% of children come from low income families. In fact the figures were closer to 75% in all cases, but ">50%" was the worst category they used. This brought with it the joys and pleasures of living in a multicultural society, but it also brought with it certain facts of live one either got used to or - if one had the choice, and many don't - which meant one moved elsewhere.

In Liverpool in the 1990s it was car crime: Matron's car was broken into four times and stolen twice and the trip to the local police station for the crime reference number became a part of normal life. As did the knowledge that the police would not have the man power or the inclination to actually search for and prosecute the perpetrators. During her stint in the capital in the early naughties she mourned the theft of four bikes in as many years. Police advised her to go to a market near Brick Lane on a Sunday morning to see if she could buy it back. In Manchester, about six years ago, she witnessed the stabbing of a man outside her front door. It was followed up but never came to court because invisible forces persuaded the suspect to return to whatever country he had come from. Realities like these happen all over the country every day. Millions of people live with them even though they don't see them portrayed on the 10 o'clock news.

None of these experiences were pleasant, but none of them particularly came as a shock and none of them made Matron call for stricter sentencing and the deployment of military force either. And most importantly, none of them made her leave those respective communities (in fact it was unsustainable house prices that forced her to move to the quiet little village where she lives now, so blame the real criminals, the bankers and speculators, for that). Because, for all their faults, they were communities and bad things that happened in them were things committed by people who where the exceptions and not the rule. That is why for every hooded bully helping him or herself to a free pair of trainers last night, there were three people cleaning up the mess they made this morning. Lets not forget that.

But what of the hooded bullies? Well, why not look at it like this? Yes, the events of the last few days were terrible. They raise a lot of questions about the society we live in and the values we pass from one generation to another. We have to discuss these questions openly and we have to address the underlying issues, like excessive consumerism and greed, and maybe even a prevailing sense of entitlement, at ALL levels of society. But they also show us that if you create a level of social inequality similar to that in certain third world countries, you are likely to get a level of social unrest that mirrors that in those countries. We all live in the society we deserve and pay for. And lets be honest, all of us - including those of us who, like Matron, belong to the category of the "not-really-rich-but-don't-have-to-worry-much-either-despite-the-cuts": we have been shopping in the bargain basement of that particular store for a long time now. Like with the organic produce that many of us are still happy to fork out for, it might be a good idea to start paying a little more for a better product.

Some random thoughts on Wikileaks and Assange

Christmas is coming ever closer and with it the overload of work that Santa seems to have in his bag these days, Matron's brain is fried from trying to get to grips with teaching, government consultations, job interviews and an excess of travel. As a result she has - to the best of her abilities - tried to inure herself from the wall-to-wall coverage of WikiLeaks, the US Embassy cables and the allegations against Julian Assange if only to allow her to get on with some stuff.

But it is getting harder to escape all that coverage and woman is a processing, pattern-making animal, so random, if often rather conflicting, thoughts on this have arisen and are taking up valuable brain space. Each of them longer than 140 characters but not really enough for a coherent blog post, they still want to be released. To make it more interesting, Matron has given them "Yes Minister" titles. Feel free to ignore; normal service will be resumed in the new year.

1. The Right to Know: While the disclosure of the documents on Iraq took the public interest hurdle with some ease, Matron can't help feeling that a lot of what came out of the Embassy cables is just a smidgen, if at all, above the tabloid newsworthiness threshold. Most of it seems to concern statements made by the No-surprise-there-department (sub-section Duh!) that inhabits a basement in the Ministry of the Bleeding Obvious. Yes, it is lovely to have your prejudices about Prince Andrew, the Rich and Powerful and those stupid, arrogant Americans confirmed, but beyond that Matron would pay good money for someone that pre-selects from those cables the things that will really make a difference to our perception of the way things are done and our willingness to do something about them. They are probably there, buried within a mountain of information, but it is terribly difficult to find them in all that gratuitous gossip. So, here's an idea for the movement: rather than going for the shock and awe effect (you've done that now and the whole world bought the bloody t-shirt), maybe next time it would be more useful to concentrate on selectively disclosing the things that really matter.
2. Power to the People: Having said all that, Matron completely agrees with many of the punters that by far the more interesting aspect of this whole affair is not what WikiLeaks has done, or even what the people whose behaviour has been exposed have done, but how the US and other countries reacted to it. Even discounting the hysterical reactions of US senators (which are unlikely to be taken seriously by many on this side of the Atlantic), the steps taken against WikiLeaks say more about the state we're in than a million indiscrete cables. It is quite clear that those whose actions have been disclosed by WikiLeaks are far more upset about the fact of disclosure than the content that has been made public. It's the paradigm change in relation to the way in which information is, can be or should be controlled that is the real issue here. As one very sensible blogger put it, being told by our masters that we can't handle the truth just doesn't wash any longer.
3. A Conflict of Interest: But at the same time, with great power comes great responsibility and Matron can't help feeling that WikiLeaks and those who support it currently get carried away just an itsibitsi tiny bit on a wave of their own omnipotency. As a privacy advocate, Matron has always fought the corner of those who argue that while transparency and freedom of speech are among the most important rights in a democratic society, they are not the only rights. They have to be balanced against other rights, freedoms and interests and figuring out how that balance should be achieved is a difficult and time-consuming process that we may just be by-bassing when pressing a button to disclose another 250,000 documents whose full contents we will not have been in a position to fully know or appreciate. Taking just the privacy argument as one example, there may be stuff in those cables that relates to private matters that the public really has no right, nor a need, to know.
4. The Smoke Screen: With the combined coverage of the WikiLeaks and Assange affairs seeimingly taking up every available inch of colunm space at the moment, is Matron the only one thinking that this would be a great time for governments the world over to bury bad news? In fact, here's a conspiracy scenario to think about while we're at it: imagine someone in the US government thinking, "Wouldn't it be great if we fed an organisation like WikiLeaks a lot of mindless chitchat that won't disclose a lot about us that people aren't already thinking anyway but that will keep the hacks and the geeks and pretty much anyone with a halfway functioning brain gainfully employed for weeks on end? Just imagine what we could get away with while they are all busy loooking the other way." In the area of IT and Cyberlaw alone, we currently have a plethora of really rather alarming proposals on the table that may change the way in which we can live, work and play, in which we can interact with each other and our governments, the extent to which those governments can exercise control over us and our actions and the extent to which we can resist that control. Yet, pretty much ALL the good brains Matron knows in this area are currently using most of their processing power on exchanging URLs for WikiLeaks mirror sites. I'm not saying that you're not doing an important job, boys and girls. But you know what? Job share! We need some of you for other stuff!
5. A Question of Loyalty: Matron admits it: when the sexual assault allegations against Assange first made the press, her immediate gut reaction was to think, "Now that suits the powers that be a little bit too much to be mere coincidence". We leftie liberals are hard-wired for conspiracy theories; the more outlandish the better. There is something about us that loves the feeling, as Technollama put it on Twitter recently, that we live in a Stieg Larsson novel. And maybe we do. But in the same way that we should try very hard not to suspect conspiracy when incompetence will do, we should not loose sight of the fact that good people sometimes do bad things. And that, consequently, we should not automatically assume that someone like Assange couldn't possibly be involved in something like a sexual offence, or that the laws of a country that allege such a thing must by defintion by wrong and illiberal and that the US must obviously have exerted great pressure on that country to bring down the full force of the law on one it now clearly views at its enemy no.1. That may all be the case, but it is no more likely than the alternative, because, at this stage, we don't know. If this had not been the founder of WikiLeaks, those allegations may still have been made and the appropriate judicial procedure might still have been employed and the people making the allegations would have been given the opportunity to prove them without being vilified as instruments of state oppression and the accused in this case would have been given the right to defend himself without his private conduct being closely linked to his professional role. While we do not know an awful lot about the charges that have been brought and the evidence available to prosecutors at this point, we should not fall into the trap of canonizing an individual in ALL areas of his life because we feel that he has acted like a saint in ONE of them. And we should not make feminist leftie liberal women feel like traitors to the cause if they cannot subsume their instinctive feeling that allegations of sexual misconduct need to be taken seriously whoever the alleged perpetrator. Julian Assange is innocent until proven guilty, but the two Swedish women and the Swedish prosecutors have every right to try to prove his guilt.
6. The Bishop's Gambit: Finally, to all those people who cannot distinguish between the charges against Assange and the charges against WikiLeaks: be concerned, be very concerned about the dangers of personificating a movenment. As many others more familiar with the ins and outs of how WikiLeaks functions have already pointed out, WikiLeaks is more than Assange and will and should continue regardless of what happens to him. Those who tie his lot together with that of the movement he helped found play into the hands of those who try to argue that the discreditation of the man will automatically discredit the movement. If he is found guilty, and at this stage this is as likely as the possibility that he will be acquitted, because WE JUST DON'T KNOW, then there will be no shortage of people saying that WikiLeaks is irrevocably tainted by his actions and that his failures in one area of his life must mean that there is no moral justification for the work he has done in others. Don't do their work for them! Make sure you separate the man from the mission.

And so on to all the other things on Matron's to-do list that are not WikiLeaks. Which, sadly, is still most of them. In the meantime, have a merry festive season!

Research is vital!

Those of Matron's readers who are citizens of academia and/or members of the Twitterati will undoubtedly be aware of the hashtag #scienceisvital and the related campaign -fought by, among others, former LibDem MP Dr. Evan Harris - that was aimed at convincing the government to "lay out a supportive strategy for UK science and engineering" by "maintaining a level of investment at least in line with economic growth ".

The petition was signed by 36290 people - among them the names of many of the most eminent figures currently working in UK Higher Education - and ultimately led to science funding being treated rather more benevolently in the context of the recent comprehensive spending review (CSR) than many other areas.

A successful strategy, therefore, from which we could all learn? Certainly! And yet, despite the fact that Matron has followed the campaign with interest while it was in its most active phase, she could not bring her self to add her name to the pledge. Why is that?

The reason is that the petition, commendable as it was in its attempt to defend the science budget, focused merely on the funding for "science" in its most narrow definition, namely "the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment". Natural sciences, in other words, or "science and technology" in more modern parlance.

Indeed, the petition itself mentions as the particular areas for which funding must be preserved "energy, medicine, infrastructure and computing". Although, many of the signatories came from the social sciences, arts and humanities communities, no mention was made of those disciplines in the petition and - as has become clear - they did not benefit in any way from the government's rethink in the CSR.

In Matron's opinion, the petition and the related campaign can therefore also be seen as an example for another development that was easily predictable and widely expected when news of severe cuts to the HE budget first came out: that rather than coming together and ganging up on a reluctant government in an attempt to convince it of the shortsightedness of its plans, the sector would engage in a divisive struggle in which each party would attempt to secure the biggest piece of an ever smaller cake. In this context we have seen old universities work against new universities, higher education versus further education and one discipline against the other. The only winner in this game has been the coalition government which has found it all to easy to get savage cuts to the arts and social sciences budgets through with minimum fuss while at the same time being able to point towards the science budget it (largely) maintained.

Make no mistake, science IS vital! Without it, we will not be able to overcome the challenges arising from threats like climate change and overpopulation. It's funding should be preserved and, if possible, increased.

But when asked by scientists to support the petition, Matron felt a little like she felt when, back in the early 90s, she moved to the UK from Germany as a (then more than now) politically active lesbian. Whereas in Germany, this group was politically more aligned with the feminist movement, in the UK, lesbians were part of the gay rights or queer movement. In practical terms this meant that, at the time, the political goals lesbians fought for and were expected to support included not only the fight against AIDS but also gay marriage. This was in open disregard of the fact that lesbians, with their "moving-in-on-the-second-date" kind of relationships were in the group least likely to be infected with the HIV virus and that feminism had worked on a critique of the institution of marriage for at least the last century.

In the end, Matron became an active volunteer for an HIV/AIDS charity - not because she was directly affected but because it was the right thing to do at the time with thousands of people dying alone and without the necessary support. But she always refused to go to any length to support the call for gay marriage. In the words of the inimitable Alison Bechdel, comic artist extraordinaire and observant chronicler of lesbian live throughout the 80s, 90s and noughties, there was no way she was going to be complicit in the enshrinement of coupledom as a privileged civil status given that there were, in her view at least, better ways to achieve equal treatment for everyone (for example, by abandoning, and not re-introducing, dear Mr Cameron, all solely marriage-related state benefits).

Matron's most interesting experience during that time was a conference ca. 1994 when she was on a panel with a high profile (female) member of gay rights group Stonewall. When asked about her views on why the lesbian movement in Germany preferred to align itself with feminist heterosexual women rather than gay men, Ms. Stonewall's responded that maybe the lesbian movement in Germany wasn't as far advanced yet as it was in the UK and the US. It was the simple arrogance of that statement which completly dismissed a political strategy on the basis of "backwardness" and which negated the many rational reasons its proponents may have had for choosing it, that took Matron's breath away then and that still appalls her now.

Because asking someone else to support your cause because it is the right thing to do, is one thing. Asking them to support it despite the fact that doing so may actively harm their own interests or political goals - and be that only because those interests or goals will be forgotten about or set aside while time and engery is spent on fighting for yours - is quite another.

So, coming back to the point Matron was trying to make:

Science is an important area of research that deserves our support and government funding. At the same time, as every HE researcher knows only too well, science has had a better deal in public funding compared to any other area of research for these past 10 years at least because science gets good PR and politicians up and down the country seem to feel that they can support spending money on the development of a new widget much more easily than, say, the teaching of drama, philosophy or sociology. How is any of the latter to compete with research to find a cure for cancer or Alzheimer's?

But demanding that the science budget should be maintained will almost inevitably mean that the budget of other research areas will suffer. Areas that are equally vital, like:

• The social sciences that will ultimately have to figure out how and to what extent society will be able to absorb, integrate and adapt to the new technologies that the scientist will come up with with.
• Economics that will enable us to "follow the money" and to figure out who benefits from new research and developments and how that benefit can be distributed in a more equitable and socially beneficial fashion.
• The arts because - as Winston Churchill is alleged to have said when asked to cut arts funding in favour of the war effort - if not for the arts, then what are we fighting for?

It is openly known in the research discipline of which Matron is a member, that over the next five to ten years at least, research funding will either have to come from Europe or from collaborative projects with members of STEM disciplines, which will allow us access to their funding pots. This will be easier for those who, like Matron and her ilk, are research active in technology law than it will be for those of her colleagues who specialise in family law or criminology or constitutional law. But that does not mean that these subjects are any less important for society or that they deserve any less support.

This is a game of divide and conquer and by singling out one area, venue or means of research over another we are playing directly into the government's hands.

So, dear scientists, Matron would love to support your petition, because she thinks it is the right thing to do. But if you ever re-open it for new signatories, would you mind changing its title?

From "Science is vital" to "Research is vital"?