Richard Thomas – the last Hurrah?

Richard Thomas’s Farewell Do

Two Partners went to Richard Thomas’s last appearance in public as the Information Commissioner. He is off to pastures new in the next 4 weeks. Some heavy hitters on stage like Jack Straw and some serious issues discussed. The discussion could have been even more participative and interesting had Jonathan Dimbleby not been gripped by the same conviction as he demonstrates on Any Questions – namely that his own questions are much more interesting than those composed by the stumblebums in the audience.

The Minister with an Advantage and in the Club

Jack Straw showed an impressive grip of modern life in spite of his recent acknowledgement of weakness in family accounting matters by waving around both his Boots Advantage Card and his key ring Tesco Club Card while making a point about the reputational disciplines and pressures that kept private sector database managers  both careful and honest – pressures and disciplines absent in the public sector with its monopolies on areas like social security and tax gathering. A civil servant could not loose a warehouse of personal data when it really was a building with miles of shelving and paper files but could do so all too easily when the warehouse has shrunk into a memory stick or CD. He acknowledged a point made by Richard about the false comfort of mass data collection. Ministers post 9/11 have undertaken to keep us all safe in a world of threats. This is a decent bit of political narrative but one where the Information Commissioner had to set some boundaries when MInisters latched onto monster databases as comfort blankets hoping that they could deliver on the safety thing by having all the digital bits and pieces of our identities and lives in one big box. Then surely they would actually know not only who the bad guys were but what they were going to do next. But the boxes have proved difficult and expensive to build. The point was made that if you are looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack why build a bigger haystack?

Google and 1984

Actually said the man from Google, we don’t care how big your haystack is. Google can still find your needle in a nano-second but even their database engineers baulked at the technical challenge of building on the scale needed to meet the ambitions of the politicians to reduce risk.  Jack Straw felt it was necessary to issue a robust denial of any suggestion that the government were looking to Orwell’s 1984 as a manual of statecraft in the digital age.

Citizen Not Much Involved?

The MAC take on this is how little people appear to be thinking about involving citizens in these debates. The great and the good, Ministers and advocacy group leaders occupy the platforms and argue the issues. The citizen does not appear to be involved and consulted much. One speaker summarised the citizen view as one where individuals were happy if their own privacy was protected and did not much care what happened to everyone else’s.

Government Best Seller

Pub Quiz Bore Fact of the day – the Data Protection Act is the best selling Act of Parliament. I don’t suppose the MP’s Guide to Claiming Allowances is actually on public sale and you may even have missed the boat if you decided to shop for a  member of the House of Lords instead.

Which? Richard

This is not of course Richard’s last Hurrah – he is off to head up something grand and paralegal. More interestingly for us old consumer hands is his position as Deputy Chair of the Council of Management of Which? Ltd or is it Consumers’ Association – the governance arrangements of CA have got a lot more complex since Partner Adamson was a member of the Council back in .. I will withhold this piece of data in full confidence that it is held somewhere on a piece of paper and who on earth could be bothered to look for that?