With no small amount of fanfare, the Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham recently announced a “formal” investigation into the use of data analytics for political purposes. The use of targeted ads in political campaigns – especially those where the Right triumphed – has been much in the headlines, and the ICO clearly feels the need to react. Denham blogged on her website: “this investigation is a high priority for my office in our work to uphold the rights of individuals and ensure that political campaigners and companies providing services to political parties operate within UK law.”. The investigation was greeted with enthusiasm – the journalist Carole Cadwalladr who has made a lot of the running over analytics in the Observer was supportive and the Data Protection activist Paul-Olivier Dehaye hailed it as ‘very important’.
Saying that Facebook is probably abusing privacy rights (and acting as a conduit for the abuse of privacy rights) is a bit like saying that rain is wet. Some of Cadwalladr’s reports have drawn fascinating (if hotly disputed) links between various right-wing vampires like Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings and Steve Bannon, and draw interesting (and hotly disputed) links between various Brexit campaigns and the tech firm Cambridge Analytica. Other of her stories are lame; a recent article complained that people Cadwalladr doesn’t approve of are outbidding people she does approve of when buying Facebook ads, which isn’t really news.
Worse than that, another article enthusiastically repeated Stephen Kinnock MP’s calls for an investigation into Tory data use, ignoring the fact that on the same day, Labour was hoovering up emails on its website without a privacy policy (which, like the marketing emails they will inevitably send) is a breach of Data Protection. The article makes the false claim that it is illegal to use data about political opinions without consent. Several people (including the chair of the National Association of Data Protection Officers) pointed this out to Cadwalladr, but the article is uncorrected at the time of writing. If you want to write about political parties and campaigns abusing data protection and privacy and you only acknowledge the dodgy things that one side gets up to, your allegations should not be taken too seriously. Politics is a swamp, and everyone is covered in slime. Given Cadwalladr’s shaky understanding of Data Protection law, it’s not hard to believe that her interest in the topic is mainly motivated by politics, and the ICO needs to be careful not to be sucked in.
It’s odd that allegations made to the ICO about data misuse by Owen Smith and Jeremy Corbyn, or candidates for the UNITE leadership have come to nothing, and yet here we have a formal investigation announced with great flourish into an issue that is largely perceived as affecting the right. I’m left-wing myself, but if Denham is going to take action over the political use of personal data, I expect her to be scrupulously even-handed.
However, I doubt very much whether action on this issue will ever happen. Just after the announcement, I made an FOI request to the Commissioner’s office about the nature of the investigation – how many people were involved and where from, what powers the ICO was using to conduct the investigation, and who the most senior person involved was. What I was trying to find out was simple – is this an investigation likely to lead to guidance or enforcement?
Here is what my FOI revealed (questions in bold, ICO answers below)
1) Under what specific powers is the investigation being carried out?
Initial intelligence gathering would fall under the general duties of the Commissioner to promote good practice (section 51) of the DPA. This may lead to use of investigatory powers and enforcement where necessary, under the provisions set out in Part V of the DPA, as well as the CMP powers at section 55A. The Commissioner also has powers of entry and inspection under schedule 9 of the DPA.
2) How many members of staff are involved in the investigation?
It’s difficult to give an exact number, the ‘group’ involved will need to be established and documented in terms of reference which will be done shortly. At this stage, from the information we hold, we can say that 16 member of staff have been involved and another 4 members of staff are also expected to be involved as the investigation progresses.
3, 4 and 5-
What are the job titles of the staff involved?
What is the name of the most senior person involved in the investigation?
Which department and team do these staff belong to?
Senior Policy Officer – Private Sector Engagement
Group Manager – Private Sector Engagement
Policy Officer – Private Sector Engagement
Lead Communications Officer – Communication Planning
Senior Policy Officer – Public Policy and Parliament
Intelligence and Research Officer – Intelligence Team
Team Manager (Intelligence) – Intelligence Team
Lead Intelligence and research Officer – Intelligence Team
Team Manager – Enforcement (PECR) – Investigations
Group Manager (Public Policy & Parliament) – Public Policy and Parliament
Senior Policy Officer (Public Policy & Parliament) – Public Policy and Parliament
Team Manager (Enforcement Team 2) – Enforcement
Team Manager – Communications – Communications Planning
Head of Corporate Affairs – Communications Planning
Group Manager – Public Sector Engagement – Public Sector Engagement
The most senior person is Steve Wood – Head of International Strategy & Intelligence – International & Intelligence Management
*************************************************************************************
What does this tell us?
The main contributors are Engagement (which is presumably the successor to the old Strategic Liaison department whose chief role was holding hands with stakeholders), and policy (whose main contribution to the debate on big data is this endless and almost unreadable discussion paper). The most senior person involved is Steve Wood, who has an academic background. Of the 16 involved, just two are from Enforcement, outnumbered even by the comms staff. Apologists for Wilmslow will leap on that bit that says “This may lead to use of investigatory powers and enforcement where necessary“, but my response to that is an armpit fart. The ICO is starting from the perspective of promoting good practice run by an academic, which is just about the silliest response to this issue that I can think of.
Some areas that the ICO regulates are prime candidates for guidance. The public sector, charities and regulated industries are likely to be influenced by what the ICO says. Other areas – list broking and compensation claims spring to mind – are immune to policy and guidance, but politics is the best example. Politics is about power – if a party, campaign or individual can take power while breaching DP law, they will. It isn’t that they don’t understand the law, it is that they don’t care. No political party or campaign will be influenced by ICO guidance, and to pretend otherwise is childish. All major political parties (Labour, LibDems, SNP, Tory) have received a PECR Enforcement Notice over automated calls, and yet they flout PECR all the time with emails and yet more calls, as anyone who heard from David Lammy knows only too well. Even when the ICO fined Leave.EU during the referendum, the campaign’s reaction (“Whatever”) could not have been more derisive because they could afford to pay the fine. Either the ICO comes into politics using its powers to the maximum possible extent against everyone (£500,000 penalties, or more useful, enforcement notices that are backed up by prosecution), or they should leave the field.
We already know that the outcome of this investigation will be revealed long after the election is over, when anything that the Commissioner says or does will have no effect on the real world. On the evidence of my FOI, I predict there will be no fines, no enforcement notices, no action. There will be a long, thorough and thoughtful report that nobody in politics will pay attention to, and only people like me will read. The first task of the Supervisory Authority under GDPR is to ‘monitor and enforce’. Long ago, when I worked there, the joke went around the ICO that senior officers operated under the mantra ‘thinking is doing’, as an excuse to avoid taking any action. I don’t care if no senior officer ever actually said this – on big strategic issues, the ICO has always laboured under this approach. Denham’s first big splash was to follow through on charity enforcement when the easy choice was to back down. She deserves praise for that decision. However, If there is an international right-wing conspiracy to hijack democracy across the world, I don’t think a thought symposium is going to save us.