You may be aware that next year we are getting, whether we like it or not, a new data protection act.
I say "whether we like it or not" because it's coming, bundled up with lots of other legislation as part of the Great Repeal Bill; the adoption of a huge swathe of EU Law directly into British law without any official debate process.
It's called the GDPR, General Data Protection Regulation, and will come into force in May 2018.
Having had a read through, I find it quite fascinating in one particular aspect - how it will change the definition of certain words. If fact the meaning of many words will change but the thing that really piqued my interest was the expansion of the term 'personal data'.
‘personal data’ means any information relating to an
identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’);
So here 'natural person' and 'data subject' are synonyms, they are interchangable, so if you are a natural person you are also a data subject. But of course, anyone who knows anything about the surveillance society will know that we have been 'data subjects' for a very long time. In fact anyone who knows anything about William the Conquerer and the Domesday Book will realise that people in this country, the chattel, have been data subjects for about a thousand years. So no real surprise there, but here comes the interesting part.
'an identifiable natural person is one who can be
identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by
reference to an identifier such as a name, an
identification number, location data, an online
identifier or to one or more factors specific to the
physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic,
cultural or social identity of that natural person;
The real change here in comparison to the previous Data Protection Act is the word genetic. Genetic data is going to be classed as personal data.
In a lot of ways, I see this document as a glimpse into a brave new world. It used to be that data collection was all about names and addresses, spending habits, wealth and political alignment, but there is a suggestion here that the new business model and where the money is really going to be made in the future is the collection and analytics of genetic data. I am starting to have a realisation now as to why a particular company has registered such great interest in that field.
Google Deepmind.
It's good to note that the founder of Deepmind, Demis Hassabis, attended his first Bilderberg conference in 2015 and then from 2016 they started to form relationships with various hospitals to analyse patient data. Of course, if you are after analysing genetic data, hospitals are the best place to find that en masse.
You may remember that I made a video over a year ago now about Deepmind and how they had an agreement with the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, London to collect and analyse historic and live medical data from 1.6 million patients so they could 'help' the hospital by running it through their machine learning algorithms. What I didn't cover was what happened a couple of months after that when they gained another agreement to analyse patient data but this time from Moorfields Eye Hospital, London.
In July 2016 Moorfields Eye Hospital entered into a data sharing agreement with Google Deepmind to provide them with 1 million patients retinal scans. The premise being that Deepmind's AI could help with better, faster diagnosis of eye conditions.
My concern here is simple. Can we really trust Alphabet Corporation with that kind of sensitive data? Because, let's not forget that, Google, et al, are allowed to do this sort of thing, not because they are proven to be a moral, upstanding, benevolent and trustworthy companies but because they have a global monopoly.
I've been quite vocal over the years about my opposition to iris scanning, but actually before researching for this post I wasn't really aware of retina scanning. And yes, retina scanning is used for medical purposes, but also it really is the big kid in terms of biometric identification. In fact it is much more successful for biometric identification than Iris will ever be which is why it is used by the American FBI and the CIA. The big corporation with the patents for creating retina scanning systems is not called 'Eyemedical', it's called 'Eyedentify'.
You could call be overly paranoid but I actually think it's a symptom of a healthy mind to be sceptical about the motives of the likes of Alphabet Corporation.
The really big myth I want to bust with this post is that of anonymisation. They produce public confidence in these mass data sharing exercises by saying that the risks are significantly lowered because the public data they are providing to these private corporations are anonymised and therefore can't be used to identify individuals. But the anonymisation of data is a myth. That was admitted in a parliamentary committee room a few days ago by an MP called Julian Huppert. He is the Chairman of the Independent Review Panel for DeepMind Health and this is what he said.
"...the word anonymous that crept in there
is a challenge. Anonymisation is not some
sort of magic spell where once you make data
anonymous it stays permanently anonymous.
And particularly with complex data sets it is
very hard to ensure that data will remain
anonymous...."
"....re-identification is in general much easier
than people realise, there's been lots of
academic projects taking apparently
anonymous data sets and then working
out how to re-identify. It's worth saying that
the proposal under the Data Protection Bill
would make it illegal to re-identify people,
however, it's not clear that that is all that
helpful, it would cause some serious
problems in the research community, but
also people who wish to do that with malicious
intent will still continue to do so regardless to
whether or not it's illegal, and we can't or
course do very much about people
re-identifying overseas..."
Overseas.. hmm, like Google you mean?
The way I see it, the new government data protection regulation is just a way to create a new style of data monopoly. In terms of protecting and therefore having a controlling stake over biometric data you could call it 'genetic feudalism'.
The real issue is, just like it was for communities living under William the Conquerer; we have to learn how protect ourselves, especially from who call themselves protectors over us.
Samuel William (swilliamism) is a video blogger based in London.
This post was constructed from the original video by Samuel William.