One thing to note in the Rochdale by-election result was it appeared that Galloway was using data to target people based on protected characteristics. This would be a breach of the data protection act. It appears to me like they had custom filters for this setup on the EARS electoral software. With growing sectarianism in British politics using data to target people like this will only increase divisions. #election#data#rochdale
@Edent It’s an interesting area. Even in the U.K. you can change your namely freely as many times if you like and without anything other than a signed statutory declaration of your new name. The power to change your name is an important right imho
Was just in the post office and overheard a lady saying she was trying to use cash more so they don’t take it away from us. Anecdotally it seems a growing concern among people that this might happen.
@tomw Yea I find that a worrying trend. It does tempt me to go in and go to pay and then just leave stuff at the till and “oh you don’t accept cash I’ll have to go elsewhere”, but that doesn’t seem hugely fair on the poor minimum wage worker in the shop!
@1br0wn worrying when they now price gate so cheaper prices are only accessible if you agree to having your data traded away. Feels unfair and exploitative. I guess we also have to now face their AI driven facial recognition surveillance as well to shop there….
“While the UK government has admitted it’s not possible to safely scan all of our private messages, it has granted Ofcom the powers to force tech companies to do so in the future.”
@toriver@GillesVilleneuveFan@openrightsgroup It’s hard to see how it wouldn’t create vulnerabilities that have potential for exploit by organsised crime or hostile intelligence agencies. Given Government runs on WhatsApp they are risking their own secure comms.
Liberty is complicated to assess with both positive and negative forms. I do think when it comes to online freedom of speech we are going to see the US constitution act as a defender of liberty. Meanwhile in both Oz and UK we see this drift towards ‘safety first, freedom second’ approach to online regulation. The UK common law traidtion increasingly seems a weak safeguard for liberty, will US actually become more a land of the free?
With both message scanning on the cards in the UK and a war on encryption + live facial recognition being touted its hard not to feel like we are taking another step down the surveillance dystopia path. So much of UK discourse is safety driven though. Seems hard to make a freedom based case.
Maybe it’s better to argue from a point of fear, concern and safety fears over a surveillance state. Whenever you raise this point people say “oh but we are not China or Russia it’s ok” but I’d we start acting like them don’t we become more like them? Aren’t We are defined but what we do not what we imagine the values of our society to be?
@gsuberland Thata good to hear that advocacy can still work. I do appreciate as well it can be quite a difficult area for people to get their heads around unless they have a technical background.
@JamesBaker of @openrightsgroup writes "At the eleventh hour of the Online Safety Bill’s passage through Parliament, the Government has found itself claiming to have both conceded that it won’t do anything stupid and that it may well press ahead if it wants to. It is in a total mess over its proposals to break end-to-end encryption and scan our private messages.." https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/omnishambles-over-encrypted-messages-continues/
@derickr@RedGreenLibre@openrightsgroup My take is that improves clauses around Ofcom remotely accessing systems (clause 91) but it doesn’t change the spy clause 122 which is about the message scanning on user-to-user services. There is some chatter that David Davis might have an amendment on that issue.
But as quoted in that article - “It would be better if these powers were completely removed from the bill”. Still realistically the Government doesn’t want to lose face and it’s realistically possible these plans will be quietly shoved into the long grass (as is likely to happen with a lot of the unworkable Online Safety Bill).
So it appears the entire UK electoral roll has been hacked. That’s over 40million records of people’s name and addresses, and possibly email as well. They didn’t tell us for nine months either! https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66441010#privacy#UK
@gsuberland That’s correct people who have registered anonymously under the 2006 Electoral Administration Act are not included in this breach. People who opted not to be on the edited roll / ‘open register’ are. It’s the edited roll / ‘open register’ that private companies can purchase. Private companies can’t purchase the full version. The version of the roll with anonymous voters removed is still referred to as the full register in the terminology used by EC.
@gsuberland Regulation 114(3) RPR 2001 - Sale of full register to credit reference agencies is the SI that says the full register (minus anonymous voters under 2006 electoral registration act) can only be sold to credit refercbe agencies. It’s the open register sometimes called the edited roll that other industries can purchase.
@gsuberland I’m sure there are breaches and candidates do illegally pass it on. It’s not hard to get two signatures and the electoral roll for a ward. A bit harder to get it for an entire local authority as you need to be a DNO. But this is the entire UK wide roll, so that is quite significant in its scale.
@gsuberland For me it’s the fact they sat on it for months and didn’t tell us. People ought to be alerted so they can be more wary of phishing scams where the scammer gains trust with their knowedge of your address and details.
@gsuberland Yea there is a question around who wanted the access. Was it a foreign state actor trying to undermine trust in electoral registration for example. The scale of the data set does mean it has other consequences. Makes it much more useful for profiling or matching to other data sets. I think generally cybersecurity and data security and data protection is not treated seriously enough.