Please appreciate the fact, dear readers, that after six years of shoveling coal into England’s dark satanic mills of regulatory hell, your faithful correspondent has sprouted an extra devil floating over her shoulder.
A tale of two TCNs
I wrote a briefing for technologists about Ofcom’s new technical notice regime under the Online Safety Act. You’ll find it at Internet Exchange, which happens to be my favourite weekly newsletter. I contrast the new regime with the Investigatory Powers Act’s separate and unrelated technical capability notice regime (of Apple fame), whilst viewing both through an ECHR lens.
Yes, this is the sort of thing I think about in the shower. Doesn’t everybody?
The best blog I’ve seen in ages
My fellow Glaswegian policy troublemaker Nik Sunil Williams, who plies his trade for Index on Censorship, has started a wonderful hobby blog. His central conceit is simple: if films invent worlds, then what are the investigative journalists in those worlds writing?
Nik is using fan fiction as a starting point for – you guessed it – policy wonking! He is taking the battles he fights in his day job, such as freedom of expression, FOI requests, press regulation, censorship, and state stonewalling, and applying them creatively to scenarios from the movies. Jurassic Park from the perspective of the corporate cover-up of the deaths of the local workers? Yes please.
In fact, this has inspired me to set myself a summer challenge to bang out a 10k word piece of fiction, which I hope Nik will accept as a guest post, about a film whose relevance to my summer dissertation is almost painful. Yes, that film! The creative challenge will give me a place to house the outcomes that I will be setting the stage for, in my dissertation, which means that I will end up with one very tight dissertation and one very loose creative endeavour.
So that’s me, publicly committed to the challenge. I’m doin’ this. Strap in.
The cognitive detachment of academia in its full glory
For one of the classes I recently finished at Strathclyde, I was assigned a piece of homework reading which…well…let’s put it this way. In a postgraduate tech law course, much of the reading can’t help but be a bit dull. It does not move you emotionally, and it does not move you physically out of your reading chair. This particular piece, by contrast, quite nearly sent me on a rage walk.
The troublemakers of Gutenberg
I had a wonderful high school English teacher who introduced me to the era which still has my heart:
The privacy threat model sitting at your dinner table
Many of you will have read about the recent bankruptcy of the genetic testing company 23 and Me. They ran one of those services where you spit in a tube, sent it away in the post, and got a report back telling you “where you were from” (based on a cable-TV understanding of 200 years of global history) and, more to the point, what diseases you might develop someday (based on playing on people’s neuroses).
Now that the company has gone under, of course, all that data – meaning people’s genetic fingerprints – are now just corporate assets up for sale, with no protections for the people that data is about, or rights for those people to have a say in where that data goes. (Naturally, people are gobsmacked that the cheap gimmick they fell for turned out to be a cheap gimmick.)
I need a new challenge
Two weeks ago I finished classes at Strath, and last week I finished my last pre-dissertation course assignments. I then granted myself a lovely staycation, reading good books and sunbathing in the radiant sunshine here on the Costa del Clyde (do not adjust your sets, this really happened.)
Having cleared my mind, my cheerful feelings of post-postgraduate accomplishment were quickly overcome with nagging thoughts for my future, and those thoughts go a little something like this:
Bloody hell, I am bored.
At last, a UK data broker removal service
I had been looking for a data broker removal service for quite a while, specifically since some salivating fanboys affiliated with a certain project* sent a threatening package to my house to make sure I got the message. God, it’s fun being a woman on the internet.
Unfortunately, all the market offerings I came across were US-only.
…until this morning, when a generous discount code from the Revolutions podcast led me to discover a data broker removal service which – hallelujah! – covers the UK, and the EU, and yes, the US too, also Canada and Switzerland.
I signed up over my morning coffee and they’d secured seven deletions before I’d finished it. Damn.
Get deleting folks. Here it is – yes this is a discount code. You get a discount! I get a discount! Everybody gets a discount! Go go go etc.
Timely update: DSIT has opened up a consultation on data brokers x adtech x national security. It closes on 12 May. Do not ignore this one.
Update, one week later: my details have been scrubbed from 18 data brokers I’d never even heard of, so far. A small part of me will sleep a little bit better.
*It’s not the one you’re thinking of.
What You Should Do
There is a masterful piece by Mike Brock titled “What You Should Do”, published on his own blog and then republished in Techdirt, which is a must-read for this moment. It’s about resistance, and stepping up to the task.
Don’t let anyone tell you that you didn’t see what you saw
“Don’t let anyone tell you that you didn’t see what you saw. They want to shake your confidence, to shame you into doubting reality, to get you to use euphemisms and political language that is ‘designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and give the appearance of solidity to pure wind'”.
bitter southerner, via the One Nation Indivisible podcast; the inline quote is from Orwell’s Politics and the English Language.
A story prompt
Once every few years you read a book which completely captures you and never lets go. It’s not just the book that you can’t put down; it’s the one that haunts you when you’re away from it. It’s the one which creates a world that you somehow travel into, while you’re reading, as if the real world around you has melted away. It’s the one that you keep forever and re-read every few years. It’s the one that you never, ever forget.
Strategies for resistance, right now
Eight years ago I stood on a stage in London and recited Shakespeare, without fluffing a single syllable (now there was a bucket list item), before proceeding to tell my audience about strategies for resistance in the face of authoritarianism. I wanted them to understand how, as coders and developers, they had more power they they realised.
I closed the talk by telling the story of René Carmille, the French census official who deliberately sabotaged his work to protect the people in the data. That story then became a Twitter thread which went viral for years. The thread even became a bit of a resource on similar stories of resistance: