Last month, during my wanders, I turned a corner in a museum and was confronted by this breathtaking musing on privacy and human identity.
That would be me
I am delighted, so I am, that so many of you are discovering what some of us have been warning for six years. And I’m equally delighted that so many of you are discovering what some of us have been working on – or rather, against – for six years.
(Did you detect my dripping Glaswegian sarcasm there? If not, try again.)
I 
do have a few things to say about what the OSA will mean for things going forward, as opposed to engaging in constant retrospection, but I’m in thorough dissertation writing mode right now. So I’ll write ’em when I write ’em.
In the meantime, here’s a tale from the journey. Yes, that “expert” would be me.
I’m laughing at it now, in fact, I was laughing at it on the day. But not everyone would.
Emptying my Pocket
Ahead of Pocket shutting down this month, I did an export of my saves. (As should you.) It occurs to me that some of you might find these interesting, so here they are. The list is heavy stuff, I won’t kid you on that, but I don’t ply my trade in sunshine and rainbows.
Somehow, that Home Office campaign got even worse.
Update: this is now a story in The Register. No I have not stopped cackling with laughter.
There was a piece in 404 recently about the myriad of web sites, including government sites, which have been invaded by SEO AI slop. Those sites had been abandoned or forgotten about or had served their purpose, and now, surprise surprise, they’re linkbait soup.
Bona lavs
As someone whose highest spiritual relationships are with books, and for whom libraries are cathedrals, today brought blessings.
In the oh so wonderful Strathclyde campus library, I spotted this board, which accompanied a generous Pride Month book display. It’s a tribute to Polari.
Polari was supposed to be ancient history, but it’s 2025. Hence the board.
Because these are the days when secret languages are needed again.
I hate that they are. But everything old is new again.
When I posted this to the socials, someone responded with a comment asking “Why do you think secret languages are needed again?” The best way for me to answer that question was to delete it.
Now think about that.
For more on Polari, there is an entire book, good fun, summarised here; you can do that or not, but fellow policy professionals really must read that same author’s book on Section 28, which I’ve previously recommended for its uncanny/terrifying parallels to our current raft of online safety legislation “for the children”. Both best purchased in paper at Queer Lit, Great Ancoats Street, Mcr. Someday, when we’re old, we’ll walk in there and buy the book about the new Polari which was born in 2025, because it had to be. Also, here’s a blog post on Polari as the modern data protection concept of data minimisation.
Mephistopheles and the original sin
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.)
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.