WRITTEN ON November 27th, 2007 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Data nitwittery, Foundation of Trust, Identity, What do we want?
Someone called Christina Zaba has a punchy piece in The Guardian today
Last week’s loss of confidential child benefit records has been a wake-up call to 25 million people about the reality of the government’s handling of our personal information. But few realise the extent of what lies ahead…This is the reality of “transformational government”
It seems she runs a PR company (probably rather a different sort of place to the noxious Text100) and is union liaison officer for No2ID. She pulls together pretty succinctly the lessons of HMRC for Transformational Government, including the corrosive role of the trade asociation (which has taken its members down a dangerous dark alley because it never bothered itself with the real needs of civil society). Those of us who are concerned baout this need to express ourselves better (as Christina does here) and those who have the weighty responsibility of getting it right need to learn to listen.
But the government refuses to listen, entranced as it is by its embarrassingly old-fashioned “vision” that technology can cure all ills – and closely advised by Intellect, the UK’s leading technology trade organisation, whose stated aim is both to “influence policy” and “improve markets” for its paying members, while offering them “exclusive relationships with government officials. The Home Office isn’t hearing the clamour of concerned voices in the international internet security community, who are saying one thing clearly: this is very dangerous.
Either Christina has been closely tuned in to IdealGov these past three years or there’s an outbreak of synchronicity going on. It’s very welcome, either way. But we need a conversation.
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Afterthought: I do wonder these days whether Transformational Government can be fixed, or whether it’s a terminal electoral liability. Have we been clear, trenchant, helpful and constructive enough in our feedback on it? From day one the problem has lain with the full implications of the glib phrase “personalised services” and the wooly from the Cabinet Offie about ID management.
I wrote to Jeff Jonas to ask Oh guru, what should we do. He gave it short shrift and just said
Greater care. Urge organizations to take greater care.
Then h thought about it more carefully and still gave it short shrift
I could craft up something more elaborate. But the cold hard facts are if organizations don’t have a well prescribed/thought out process for data transfers … they are going to get burnt eventually.
There isn’ some complicated great highfalutin answer to this problem, least of all a list of technical fixes. It’s at the level of:
1. Care
2. Learn to listen
3. Behave in a way that earns trust
4. Be realistic that things go wrong
5. Fix them when they do.
Whether we use Vista or Linux to do that is hardly the point.
2 Responses to “Christina Zaba on transformation, HMRC and No2ID”
The underlying OS may not matter, but strikes me that governments could learn a lot by looking at the way OS’s treat their users. Currently it seems more Vista-like: This is the way it “needs” to be done. Trust us. A lot of people would like it to be more Linux-like: Get your tech sorted out!
Both of these ignore what Apple, for example, do relatively well: give the public what they need in order to be able to get on with their lives. Otherwise, stop fiddling with it.
Too easy to forget what a democracy is there for.
Phil tells me Christina is in fact the recent widow of the lovely Stefek whom I met a couple of times. Hi Christina! Your article has caused much consternation inside government, although no-one will tell me what they think is wrong with it. There’s a sort of official “if only we put our message across more effectively the media would be less ill-informed” vibe. Yeah, right. Like the problem is you’re not listening so the solution is shout louder.