Of mashers and snoopers

If ever anyone added two plus two and got five, that person is Nick Hurd MP. As a result, he’s earned a rebuke from the guardian of the integrity of the nation’s numeric data, the UK Statistics Authority, for his political meddling in matters that are the proper province of the professional statisticians.

Hurd’s complaint was that the inclusion of separate questions about the number of bedrooms and identity of overnight visitors in a household in the recently trialled 2011 census amounted to government snooping. Put the two together, he implied, and you were prying further into people’s private lives than was justifiable.

Where he crashed and burned was in believing that politicians decided what questions go into the census. He’s also at least 10 years out of date. Although the question about bedrooms is new, the crucial one – who’s staying in your house on census night – was asked in the 2001 census and is in any case essential for ensuring that no-one gets missed out.

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of the census. It’s not only the bedrock of public service planning, and of decisions on who gets how much help, but it’s also a vital business tool, providing data on a scale and comprehensiveness that no market research team could begin to match.

As well as trialling the 2011 questions, the Office for National Statistics is also thinking about its aims and aspirations for the outputs. They’ll be consistent, joined-up and comparable across the UK (naturally); free at the point of delivery (hooray); disseminated using up-to-date technology; and capable of flexible table generation online.

So, of course, they’ll be mashable, and this is where – ill-founded as his remarks may have been – Hurd might just have touched a popular raw nerve. Because mashing raises two crucial questions: who’s doing it, and can they be trusted to get it right?

Straining at the leash

Ever since the Show Us A Better Way campaign, initiated by the government-appointed Power of Information Taskforce, the government has been encouraging developers to find ingenious ways of mashing official data for social and economic benefit. As long as that mashing relates to public services – recycling, or the location of postboxes or public toilets – there should presumably be no problem. But were it to extend to household sleeping arrangements, safeguards would clearly be in order.

And safeguards there certainly are – longstanding ones in the case of the census. Any data that could conceivably identify individuals is withheld, and individual census returns are kept confidential for 100 years.

Now the Cabinet Office has launched data.gov.uk to allow developers to play with over 1,000 datasets and see what could be mashed from them. It too has safeguards. If you want to participate, you have to apply to join a closed Google group and get approval. And, even when you do get that approval, you find that none of the current datasets contains personal data on individuals.

Beta-tested since October, data.gov.uk launches fully this month. No question that useful results will come out of it, but with over-eager watchdogs like Hurd straining at the leash, it could also be a hostage to fortune.

A freedom of information request made recently by infrastructure specialist Software AG has revealed that more companies and government departments than ever are reporting data losses to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). So it’s probably not surprising that a new survey commissioned from PoliticsHome found 62% of people strongly disagreeing with the proposition that the government can be trusted to keep our personal information secure.

Safe in their hands?

In truth, though, neither of these results is necessarily quite what it seems. The Software AG figures could simply reflect increased reporting under the ICO’s voluntary scheme. And the PoliticsHome survey was commissioned by Big Brother Watch, an arm of the spending cuts-oriented TaxPayers’ Alliance and scarcely a disinterested party.

At long last, politicians of all major parties are demonstrating real commitment to opening up government-compiled data for wider use. The newish Digital Britain minister, Stephen Timms, has committed government to playing its part in supporting mashing. And at their party conference, the Conservatives pledged themselves to publish online 20 of the most socially useful government datasets within 12 months of a general election.

What might those datasets be? As the Open Knowledge Foundation points out, that could be for you to say, through the Office of Public Sector Information’s data unlocking service. But can the politicians successfully continue along this path while also convincing people that the sometimes intimate details their officials collect are safe in their hands?

One thing they could do is to make sure that, as data protection in the UK reaches its 25th anniversary, the ICO has the teeth it needs to do its job properly. The ICO seems to be on a roll at the moment, but since it’s responsible for freedom of information as well as data protection, its relations with government have been rocky at times.

What really matters to the information industry is that the welcome moves in the direction of greater access to the government data that we’ve all paid for shouldn’t be derailed by maverick MPs or single-issue pressure groups. We need to square the circle by enabling more exploitation of vital data while safeguarding information that should remain private, and this profession must lend its expertise to ensuring that that’s exactly what happens.

Tim Buckley Owen is a journalist

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