David Stoughton of ValueKinetics writes:
What, I am tempted to ask, does the UK government not understand about an admonition to stop hoarding DNA data? Or, for that matter, about the huge waste of public money that is the ID card scheme. But such questions are fruitless. We are faced with a regime that perceives the gathering and storage of data, any data, as a universal panacea. "Can't think of anything to do about it? No problem! Just collect the data, then we can tell people it's all under control"
That data will solve any problem is almost a religious creed, and not just amongst tired, fractious, cabinet ministers bereft of other ideas, it's becoming an imperative of action-man politics. As with all political shibboleths, we are shortly going to witness the very real downside. No! Not I'm not referring to more of our personal details left on trains, or emailed directly to the fraudsters without passing Go, I'm talking about a serious loss of competitiveness and the stifling of innovation.
Data is, in reality, being used to centralise power. Not just in the executive, though that's the epicentre but in the, otherwise challenged, institutions of the state like the NHS, the police and local government. And we, the public, are being sold the story that this is a good thing. Treatments (well, OK, waiting times) will improve, crimes will be solved, terrorists apprehended before they can act. Without the data it's all going to get worse, much worse, believe me and so on, and on ....
Evidence for all this is very scant - indeed most of the improvements that ministers point to prove illusory or gained at the expense of other, equally important, benefits - but polls indicate that the public has been persuaded that data hoarding is essential to their health and security. Meanwhile the very real problems that the belief in centralised, institutionally-administered, data are storing up are off the radar.
Here's the issue. Centralised data, in the hands of the few, is being used to embed and conserve existing practice. It is, whether intentionally or not, a way of resisting change. All the evidence shows that real, IT-enabled, change happens bottom up. There are obvious examples out there, social media and mobile culture among them. There are also many, less evident but more telling, examples in the worlds of medicine and finance amongst others.
As a special report, 'Medicine goes digital', in last week's Economist pointed out, there are medical facilities in India and Thailand where digital patient records are far in advance of anything we have here - at a fraction of the cost - precisely because these initiatives are not centralised ... and, also because they are not centrally directed, such schemes are evolving fast. Commentators in the report agree that the impending medical revolution will happen only when patients, who know far more about what's happening to them now than the doctors can, become central to the process. That is, anywhere but here, where the old adage,"doctor knows best", is reinforced by control of the data.
Similar developments in finance, like Zopa, are not going to be initiated by banks, especially when governments regulate them to death. It is likely that stricter regulatory regimes will mean that real developments in personal finance - the ones that will replace our current, broken, systems - will also take place anywhere but here. Indeed I hear that Thailand is, once again, the unlikely venue for some interesting new thinking. I wonder also about the work of Dr Capra on mobilising distributed data, previously referred to (Security is so yesterday); will that be killed by an insistence on centralisation and regulation?
I could go on, but the point is this. Centralised, data-driven, heavily-regulated systems are the tools of the new conservatism. They are being used to entrench institutions in which the public is enjoined to place unquestioning trust, working against a tide of distrust in institutions that seemed almost unstoppable a few years ago. These schemes militate against innovation, and they jeopardise more than our personal data and our freedoms, they threaten our prosperity too.
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