‘Everyone responsible for using personal data has to follow strict rules called ‘data protection principles’ unless an exemption applies.’
gov.uk, explaining GDPR
What do you do when confronted with that annoying ‘Cookie and Privacy Notice’ challenge which stops you entering a website for the first time? According to Performance Marketing World, 56% of UK consumers admit to always accepting cookies in full.
Whether your reason is not to be distracted by yet another technical process, or whether it’s as a result of not understanding the consequences of allowing full access, your acceptance opens an unlimited door to the exploitation of your data and your downstream internet usage.
Whether regulators really understood the extent to which tech businesses can drill into our personal interests and mine our data when they first introduced GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations), who can tell? But there's no doubting the fact that it provides very little practical protection; tech giants are running rings around GDPR.
Artificial Intelligence (AI), meanwhile, has significantly increased the challenge for data protection: it has allowed individuals’ data and creativity to be dissolved almost without a trace, as Philip Pullman complained last week while launching the next book in his ‘Book of Dust’ series, ‘The Rose Field’.
As Emma Duncan commented in the Times on 29th August, this absorption of data and creativity into untameable tech vibrancy is inevitable — but it's also resulting in massive polarisation of wealth.
The theory of data protection assumed that we can beat these forces: it's now proven that we can't.
We would therefore do better to find ways of joining them in sharing their wealth creation.
However, there are also people who suffer unknowingly from Government’s restrictive treatment of GDPR. Its approach towards data protection is currently denying hundreds of thousands of young people access to money that is rightfully theirs, by not allowing the automatic release of Child Trust Funds in their own name: more about this later.
Of course, the exploitation of data is only part of the problem resulting from our popular embrace of technology. The other significant impact is the steady erosion of employment opportunities for young people, illustrated by the recent plunge in student loan repayments: this confirms a serious job shortage for graduates.
There is ongoing debate about the extent of technology’s impact on unemployment generally, but the cutting edge of that problem impacts young people. The more we move away from in-person business and communication, and the more that AI provides answers and text which were previously supplied by people in work, the fewer jobs there will be.
The answer is not Universal Basic Income, or ‘welfare subservience’ as I choose to call it. As stated earlier, if you can't beat the problem of technology invading our lives, we should join forces with it. That means direct participation in the wealth creation and governance of the tech giants themselves: the businesses which are taking our data, our creativity and our employment.
It means issuing equity stock so that people can benefit directly.
And because all these features of data, creativity and employment are so quickly dissolved into untraceable linkages by AI, this equity stock participation needs to be as near universal as can be achieved.
Share Alliance has been working on this approach for the past two years, and it looks forward to producing economic modelling in the near future in order to show how it would work in practice.
But what about Government’s approach to data protection?
While they arm themselves with the right to intrude into so much of our private lives, they also use data protection as an excuse to refrain from providing real value to people who need it. A current live example of this is their reluctance to introduce an automatic release process for HMRC-allocated Child Trust Funds once their account owners reach 21 years of age.
These young people, most of whom come from low-income backgrounds, are generally wholly unaware that money has been set aside for them in these individual accounts. The Share Foundation has for the past two years been attempting to have an automatic release process introduced using National Insurance numbers in order to pass their money to them through payroll, benefit or student loan channels. However, ‘data protection’ is regularly cited as a reason why that shouldn't happen.
On the one side, therefore, we see the surging wealth of data and creativity harvesting while at the same time AI is removing young people’s job opportunities; while on the other, Government is using data restriction as a reason to keep young people in poverty!
These are reasons why we need to turn over a new leaf when it comes to scrutinising data. Instead of a regressive, defensive approach which is clearly not working, we need to look forward with a positive and common-sense set of objectives which prioritise people over the interests of both business exploitation and government defensiveness.
GDPR was a concept developed by the European Union in 2016: in its current form, it has passed its sell-by date already. At present, it is only serving the interests of business and defensive governments — it should be serving the people who it is designed to protect. We can achieve this by enabling those people to participate in the wealth creation of technology, and by giving Government the necessary confidence to provide young people with access to money that is rightfully theirs.
Gavin Oldham OBE
Share Radio