LONDON (Labour Buzz) - The current pandemic has been a challenge for most of us, but for data companies it has been Christmas come early as they get a foothold in government services and access to the kind of data they’ve been eager to get their hands on for years.
Take Faculty, the AI startup which helped deliver Brexit and has received nine government contracts in just 18 months; or Palantir the firm run by Trump supporter Peter Thiel, which alongside Faculty has been given unprecedented access to a treasure trove of NHS personal data. Meanwhile, credit rating company TransUnion demands your credit history before allowing you to book a Coronavirus test.
The issue is not the fact that the Government is using technology companies to assist in the fight against COVID 19. In a crisis like this, any responsible Government should explore every avenue it possibly can. The problem is that the Government has chosen this moment to hand over an enormous amount of data to companies and people whose track records do not inspire trust.
Big data
First let’s look at Palantir, a company that takes its name from a magic orb used by the dark Lord Sauron. Its CEO Peter Thiel is a big supporter of Donald Trump, has accused Google of being ‘treasonous’, attacked Silicon Valley for being too left-wing and hopes to gain eternal youth by injecting himself with the blood of young people.
His company has been embroiled in controversy for its aggressive use of big data aggregation and using involvement with the US Government’s brutal policy of deportations. Its crime predictive software has been used by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as, police forces around the world. In echoes of the Philip K Dick novel, Minority Report, it claims to predict crimes before they even happen to allow police forces to focus on known or likely crime hotspots.
The system has undergone intense criticism for reinforcing existing prejudices. Testifying to the EU Parliament, Andrea Nill Sanchez, Executive Director of the AI Now Institute said: “Predictive policing systems will never be safe… until the criminal justice systems, they’re built on are reformed.”
The AI startup Faculty, meanwhile, earned its stripes during the Brexit referendum for polling analysis services provided to Vote Leave; the same Vote Leave which, according to the Electoral Commission, broke electoral law. The company’s CEO Mark Wilson has close ties to Dominic Cummings and is said to have attended SAGE meetings. His brother Ben was recruited by Cummings to assist during the election campaign.
Over the past 18 months, the company has been awarded a plethora of Government contracts and was controversially given access to highly sensitive NHS data alongside Palantir as well as tech giants like Amazon and Google.
These companies have been eager to get their hands on this data for years which includes highly sensitive birth to death information such as contact details, gender, race, religion, occupation, physical and mental health conditions.
Faculty’s involvement is going even deeper. Earlier this month, it was handed a £400,000 Government Coronavirus support contract to monitor the impact of the virus on communities. As part of this agreement, Faculty says it may have to look at information such as social media data, utility bills and even credit rating scores, according to a partially redacted leak of the contract.
Credit scores are also, for reasons which remain unclear, key for TransUnion’s contract to help people book a Coronavirus test from home. If you try to book a test online on the Government’s website, you’ll be told you need to share this information with the company. If you refuse, you are told to start again and advised to use a drive-through option.
Exactly why a credit history is so vital for tackling a virus is unclear, however once again the government is handing over highly sensitive data to the US company which again does not have a very good history. In 2017 a judge awarded damages of $60 million to customers who accused the company of falsely reporting that they were on a list of terrorists and other security threats. The judge found that the company had not put reasonable precautions in place to stop these errors being made.
Privacy concerns
These contracts all have a common theme. Huge amounts of personal data are being handed over to private companies, with little or no transparency. The Government has used this crisis to dramatically expand the surveillance of our daily lives. It’s learning a huge amount about our movements, habits and lifestyle choices and has handed it over to people whose track records show time and time again that they can’t be trusted.
This is a crucial point. At this time of crisis, data can be crucial to the fight against COVID 19, but there has to trust that the Government will handle that data responsibly, but with Dominic Cummings at the helm, it would be naïve in the extreme to assume it will do so.
Privacy campaigners have been quick to raise concerns. Campaign group Foxglove, which has launched a legal challenge to stop the Government using private companies and sensitive private data, highlights the danger. “We haven’t seen the contracts, we haven’t seen the data-sharing agreements,” said Cori Crider, FoxGlove’s Director. “We don’t know what they’re permitted to do with [the data].”
In April, they teamed up with OpenDemocracy to keep confidential NHS data out of the hands of private companies. They have requested that the Government release the agreements relating to the NHS data store and how it will be used, but so far, the Government has refused.
Big tech
The Government has always been a big believer in technology and has been throwing open its doors to tech companies and issuing legislation to support them. For example, Miracl, the British Cryptographic firm which provides services to GCHQ and the US Airforce, looks poised to benefit from protections the Government is planning to put in place against foreign takeovers of the country’s technology firms.
The firm markets the Miracl Trust application, a multi-factor authentication system (MFA) using the cryptographic principle of zero-knowledge proof, which replaces the traditional identifier/password combination with a 4-to 6-digit. It is set to benefit from upcoming EU legislation increasing requirements for authentication and data security.
However, in its haste to work with these firms they have put little thought into what data is being shared, how trustworthy the people being given access are and what will happen with the information. In a world where high profile data breaches are common, and in which big companies have been found guilty of misusing information promises to keep it safe and work responsibly hold little value.
(Written by Tom Cropper, Edited by Klaudia Fior)