13th July 2011

Watching me, watching you!

I was reflecting on the weekend demise of the News of the World following the great phone tap debacle and must admit to some concerns. I am minded of the quote from the former US President Ronald Reagan, who I met in very strange circumstances a good few years ago. He said in a speech “Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves”.

This is a country that suddenly has sat up and thought, rightly so, that this current spate of phone tapping revelations is a gross invasion of our privacy, it is neither morally correct nor justifiable. The media and public opinion was calling for heads to roll. Parliament has debated the matter and may go down the route of a judicial review and more arrests are almost inevitable, as this whole sorry mess appears to have involved the police taking money for tip-offs. To make matters worse the practice of phone tapping by the media may be far more widespread than the world initially suspected of News International.

But, is our sense of national shock and indignation missing the bigger picture?

Because lost in this mob-like, media driven hysteria is the fact in the UK we live in one of the most surveillance ridden societies in the world so should we really be focusing so much on News International when it would appear that numbers and persons unknown are tracking what you say, what you do, when, how and where every moment of your day and frequently without your consent or knowledge.

Financial services is a highly regulated world where information is exchanged about individuals and firms in ways that many of us could find disturbing, and this is before firms even begin to deliver torrents of data and information to the FSA, the purpose of which is not always fully understood.

There have been fears for some time that the UK is sleep walking into a surveillance society with everyday actions being subject to very real monitoring both openly and covertly.

But surveillance ranges from US security agencies monitoring telecommunications and air passenger traffic passing through Britain, to key stroke information used to gauge work rates and GPS information tracking company vehicles. A 2006 Report on the Surveillance Society said; “that by 2016 shoppers could be scanned as they enter stores, schools could bring in cards allowing parents to monitor what their children eat, and jobs may be refused to applicants who are seen as a health risk.

I think that they got the timescale predictions wrong by five years or more. Today sees us being watched, tracked, and listened to by:

• 5m plus CCTV cameras with some 300 CCTV appearances a day
• Car registration plate recognition cameras
• Shop RFID tags
• Mobile phone triangulation
• Store loyalty cards
• Credit card transactions
• London Oyster cards
• Satellites
• Electoral roll
• NHS patient records
• Personal video recorders
• Phone-tapping
• Hidden cameras/bugs
• Worker call monitoring
• Worker clocking-in
• Mobile phone cameras
• Internet cookies
• Keystroke programs

and more...

Recent research has shown that the Shetland Islands Council and Corby Borough Council - among the smallest local authorities in the UK - have more CCTV cameras than the San Francisco Police Department.

And the London borough of Wandsworth has the highest number of CCTV cameras in London, with just under four cameras per 1,000 people. Its total number is more than the police departments of Boston [USA], Johannesburg and Dublin City Council combined.

So with all this in mind, exactly what is achieved with all this surveillance and exchange of data? There is so much of it that I think nobody knows where to start anymore in analyzing what data they have let alone asking why we have it!

What has and is being done with the data the FSA has collected about you, with or without your knowledge each year? FSA Reporting requirements are huge and varied. All that data gathering did not stop the meltdown of the banking system. It did not stop PPI miss selling. It did not stop Maddoff,  Arch Cru or Keydata and no doubt there will be other issues already bubbling away that it will not stop either.

Is it not time to have a debate about what data is relevant to good regulation, how best it can be gathered, who is allowed to gather it, how it is stored, who has access to it and how you can check it is correct?

This could help streamline the whole system, reduce costs and allow firms as well as the FSA or FCA to see the wood from the trees, something that many may say has not been the case to date. It may even lead to better regulation and consumer protection. Or would Big Brother not like that?

FSA/FCA, Panacea Comment