For some time Bill Mew, our principle consultant, has been calling for regulatory reform – not just in privacy and data protection, where we have seen GDPR and may soon see federal regulation in the US, but also in associated areas like facial recognition and AI.
- February 19, 2019
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- Regulation
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Bill is an advocate for seeking the right balance between digital transformation ‘changing the world’ and digital ethics ‘doing the right thing’. He has been calling for privacy policies that provide meaningful protection while also promoting economic and social good.
In this interview he looks at the fall out from the recent report in the UK that labelled Facebook as a ‘digital gangster’ and found that it had ‘intentionally and knowingly’ violated data privacy laws.
Facebook is going from a digital ethics problem to a crisis management one. What it did wrong may well be sanctionable, but the way that it has handled these issues subsequently by providing misleading accounts and by refusung to appear before the UK parliamentary committee has compounded the situation and made things a great deal worse.
We have had the tech revolution and then the tech backlash. At some point we need to move on and to focus on finding a balance so that we can regulate to ensure that there are adequate privacy protections and ethical behaviour, while maximising economic and social value.
There will be fierce lobbying from privacy activists and big tech on either side, and striking the right balance won’t be easy. However it is not being helped by Facebook’s actions or indeed by politicians who have a low understanding of technology (the questioning in the congressional hearing attended by Facebook was not up to the job – thankfully the more recent report by the DCMS parliamentary committee in the UK is fare better informed and thought out).
