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tv   The Data Guardian Elizabeth...  BBC News  October 24, 2021 11:45pm-12:01am BST

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given have simply with her as well. given her age and what her official duties have been and the amount of service she is given throughout her entire life, and i think they will look to the palace for some kind of straightforward responses beyond what we heard earlier this week about whether she was in hospital were not. that does not really help dampen down speculation or concern, so certainly my thoughts are with her. ~ ., , , ., ., so certainly my thoughts are with her. a, , , ., ., ,, ., her. 0k, mo hussein, faiza shaheen, thank ou her. ok, mo hussein, faiza shaheen, thank you for— her. 0k, mo hussein, faiza shaheen, thank you for your _ her. 0k, mo hussein, faiza shaheen, thank you for your time _ her. 0k, mo hussein, faiza shaheen, thank you for your time for _ thank you for your time for heavy cracking week ahead of you and thank you your time listening to us. to stay with us on bbc news, our media editor amol rajan has been speaking to the uk information commissioner elizabeth dunham. that's coming up next. —— had a cracking week ahead.
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the information commissioner's office describes itself as the uk's independent authority, set up to uphold information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals. for the past five years, the commissioner has been elizabeth denham, and she leaves her post at the end of november. elizabeth, thank you very much indeed for speaking to the bbc. so you've been information commissioner since 2016, summer of 2016, a particularly lively period in british politics. were you quite aware of what you were getting into, in terms of the sheer scale, the gargantuan power of, in particular, the californian tech companies that have been so much of your focus? well, i had been in the cross hairs of some of those big companies in my previous work in canada, but what i didn't know, and i think none of us knew,
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the massive acceleration of information communications technologies, the take—up of services online and also the size and scope of these companies that are bigger than nation states. and the lobbying power that comes with it, because these companies have added trillions of dollars in their power and they spend some of that money trying to stop, through lobbying, people like you from regulating them. the other thing that i've learned in this job is that big tech not only has lobbying power, but they also have really deep pockets. so when it comes to litigating, and these companies are definitely willing to litigate against public authorities like my office, deep pockets means that there's and inequity of arms when we're tackling these big companies. so, i mean, just the acceleration of technology and, especially with the pandemic, how much of our lives we now spent online, this has been a change that
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i couldn't have anticipated. well, you had an early skirmish which maybe became a battle when, in 2017, you launched an investigation into use of personal information and political influence. the scale of your investigation was completely unprecedented for a data protection authority anywhere in the world. 0ne element of your investigation, a big element, was the eu referendum. can you just remind us what your conclusion was on that specifically? we were looking at more than 30 organisations that were part of data—enabled political campaigning, so that's why it was really important to look at the political parties, we needed to look at the data brokers who provide a lot of this data, the platform, particularly facebook, and the company that was the centre of this crisis and these questions, which was cambridge analytica, a british company. but to distil it down, something that some people who have a kind of ambient awareness of this company may not know is that
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you concluded that, in the end, it would be wrong to assume that data from cambridge analytica played any role, let alone a critical role, in influencing people to vote leave. we could not find the evidence. and as a regulator, we have to be driven by the evidence that we found. we did find that cambridge analytica had flirted with having... a relationship. ..a contract, a relationship with the campaigns. we even know there was some trials done with the use of data. but what we discovered, which was more important than anything, was we were able to pull back the curtain so that the public and media and civil society and our legislators understood about the power of data in political campaigning. and i think we stopped the train from leaving the station. so if we hadn't done that investigation, if we hadn't proven that all of these companies
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operating in an ecosystem needed to slow down in the use of that data or else, we would feel the impact on our democracy. so as part of your investigation into cambridge analytica, you fined facebook what was then the maximum fine at your disposal, which is £500,000. facebook appealed, and it did get quite legally complex because the upshot was that an agreement was reached. facebook agreed to pay the £500,000 fine, but they did not admit liability. there's no admission of liability, as far as i understand it. was it a source of frustration to you at the time that your armoury was so limited that you could ask a company now worth over $1 trillion for £500,000? it's... it was deeply frustrating. why? because the signal i was trying to send is that we had never issued a fine for the maximum amount under our old regime.
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and if i had had more significant fines, then i would have used them against facebook, because i think the contravention was extremely serious. now, facebook have made a huge number of changes to how they operate. they've made their ad library much more transparent, they've changed the privacy settings and the availability of privacy settings to users. what's your assessment of whether or not facebook is a safe place now? i think the platform is safer. we also know that they've made some commitments to protect children on the platform, and that's definitely been a focus of my office. so, yes, facebook is a safer place to go for people, but some of the commitments feel like they're sticking plaster, as opposed to real changes in the data governance and how the business model works. well, the accusation of one former facebook employee, frances haugen, goes further than what you're saying, which is that, actually, for facebook, ultimately — in her view —
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the bottom line is what counts. and they put profits before people, in her view. she used to work on the company's algorithmic products, and she was very damning in her evidence to a senate committee. facebook hides behind walls that keeps researchers and regulators from understanding the true dynamics of their system. facebook will tell you privacy means they can't give you data. this is not true. let me put to you what mark zuckerberg said in response — on facebook, of course. he says, "i think most of us" — presumably facebook employees — "just don't recognise the false picture of the company that is being painted." and he said, "at the heart of these accusations is this idea that we prioritise profit over safety and well—being. that's just not true." we're looking really closely at what is publicly available right now from frances's testimony. so we're looking at that publicly available information. but i've also written to her, to ask her for access to the full reports of her allegations, the full reports that she made to the securities and
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exchange commission, because what i want to do without evidence is analyse it from the uk's perspective — are these harms applicable in the uk, especially through the lens of children? so, as you know, we have rolled out a new children's code which specifies design consideration to protect kids online. and i want to see if these allegations point to any contravention of uk law, and then i will take action. i guess the enforcement of that dovetails with gdpr, the general data protection regulation, which came into effect under your watch. how valuable and effective has gdpr been as a legal framework? the strength of the gdpr is that because there were high fines and new enforcement tools for the regulator, companies paid attention to it. and data protection,
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instead ofjust being an it issue, became a board—level issue, and so i think companies took data protection seriously for the first time in 20 years. i want to briefly look at how the criminaljustice system is being influenced by the ico during your time as commissioner. last year, you released an investigation into the use of mobile phone extraction by police forces conducting criminal investigations in england and wales. those safeguards are now going to be enshrined in law, which a lot of people have put down as a big success for your office. what were you concerned about? and what will this work mean in practice? the mobile phone extraction investigation, and our work across the uk, is one of the most important files that i've ever dealt with. when police forces started to require victims of sexual assault to upload everything on their mobile phones, put it in the hands of police and prosecutors, then that created a chill on women and men reporting sexual assault.
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and i think that was such a serious issue, so we needed to intervene and find a way to work with police so that their lines of inquiry had to be clear before they uploaded data from victims' phones. a lot of people think that the pandemic has led to a kind of massive data landgrab by central government. how confident are you that that's necessary and proportionate? data protection didn't stand in the way of the kind of reasonable public health surveillance measures that needed to be put in place. so, we became very used to a proximity app that was tracing and advising who we were coming in contact with, we got used to the idea of vaccine passports, which are important if you want to travel or attend live events, so we know that.
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0n the other hand, the decommissioning of these systems is something that we'll be looking at really carefully. and i'm drafting a report to parliament on covid measures and the importance of decommissioning or ensuring that when these systems are no longer needed, they're not going to be fluid, are not going to be continued by the government. let me end by asking you some quickfire questions. are you on any of the following social media platforms — facebook? no. snapchat? no. instagram? no. tiktok? no. any social media platforms? no. what forms of communication do you use? are you on whatsapp? no. signal? yes. search engines — which search engines do you use for personal use? google search? yes. microsoft bing? yes. duckduckgo? yes. big fan of duckduckgo. why? because i think it was
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the first search engine that rolled out their services in a privacy—by—design way. have you ever had anyone deny you information by saying they can't give it to you due to data protection reasons? always. happens to me all the time. how do you deal with that? and often, it's complete crap. i call them out on it. you've been quite outspoken about specific proposals to reform the ico and its constitution. what are you worried about? some of the proposals in the government's data reform consultation, i agree with. the new powers that are being suggested for the ico to do with nuisance calls and nuisance texts, biggerfines for companies that get it wrong, absolutely agree with that. i also agree with the review of the law. but an independent regulator is really important to trust and confidence. and if a regulator can be leaned on politically or if government directs the work of the regulator, then i think that undermines
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the trust that other countries are going to have with us in doing trade deals, that people have in whether somebody�*s truly standing up for their rights. i think my work on data in political campaigns would have been almost impossible to do if i had to take my marching orders from government. elizabeth denham, the uk's information commissioner for the past five years, thank you very much indeed. hello there. this upcoming week is go to be quite unsettled. the further north and west of our, the more wet you are. all errors will be my. today is one of sunshine and showers. most of these across southern and western areas. northwest scotland looks like will turn cloudy. windy for the north and west. breezy day for awful service of the across more sheltered eastern parts. they could stay dry altogether. top temperatures around
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15 or 16 degrees in the south, close to 11 or 12 in the north. it stays quite showery to my date night and then we look at the next frontal system approaching western areas, to bring wet weather by internet to northern ireland western scotland, wraps northwest england. further south you are tending to stay drier for seven that is really the theme as we move through the week. it is northern and western areas that was either wettest and windiest weather. further south and east, tending to stay drier in branch with some sunshine, but wherever you are, it's going be pre—mild all week.
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welcome to newsday, reporting live from singapore, i'm karishma vaswani. the headlines: making social media a safer space. as the facebook whistle—blower prepares to face british mps tomorrow, she meets a campaigner whose child took her own life. i think of the most basic level right now there is no company in the world that has as much power as facebook and is little transparency. colombia captures one of the world's most wanted drug lords. he now faces possible extradition to the us. he's best known for playing gunther in �*friends' actor james michael tylor has died aged 59. and the writings on the cave wall we'll be uncovering the cultural treasures hidden beneath the hills of indonesia.

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