Network Privacy 2

Following on from my previous post on Network Privacy.

Privacy and data protection are primarily understood in terms of facts about one person. But most of the facts we are really interested in (gossip, political scandal, dastardly deeds and worse) involve more than one person.

• John Major and Edwina Currie
• John Profumo, Christine Keeler and Yevgeny Ivanov
  
• David Mills and Tessa Jowell - with possible connections to the prime ministers of Great Britain and Italy
  
• Peter Mandleson and his friends, Cherie Booth and her friends
• David Blunkett, Kimblerly Quinn and a two-year-old boy who cannot be named for legal reasons (ha!)
• Simon Hughes, Mark Oaten, George Michael, ...
  
• Jeremy Thorpe and Norman Scott
• ... and jumping from the amusing to the horrible ...
  
• Soham murderer Ian Huntley and those who had made previous allegations against him
  
• and so on ...
  

This is particularly true if we are rigorous about including provenance. An allegation against person A by person B is a fact about B as well as a fact about A. B's credibility (and any other allegations made by B, as well as links between B and any other people making allegations against A) may be relevant to the veracity of the allegation.

(If someone made an unfounded allegation about me, I should perhaps feel slightly more comfortable if this was stored in some database as an allegation, with a defined provenance, rather than as unvarnished fact or vague probability. And I should want anyone reading the allegation to be automatically presented with my refutation as well. See my post on Google and Spin, which discusses the Prince Charles approach to news management.)

Why are we more interested in facts involving two or more people? One reason is that it is relevant to trust. If a politician has failed to disclose a loan, this may be relevant to his/her public duties. This is where there starts to be a conflict between privacy and public interest.

Where does this leave Prince Charles and his diaries? The relationship between royalty and the newspapers has often been uncomfortable. In 1908, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany unwisely gave an interview to the London Daily Telegraph, in which he liberally insulted half the people of Europe. Surely the people (vox populi and all that) have a right to know if the Kaiser is an ass?

Blind Eye

John's post Overstepping Bounds describes pharmaceutical companies turning a blind eye to the provenance of clinical data.

Strange as it may seem (in trust terms at any rate if not in commercial terms) authorities in the west readily accept results of tests done in the third world when it comes to licencing drugs. So boundaries become meaningless when the mega rewards of getting a new drug accepted in the west are at stake.

In my SOAPbox blog, I have just commented about the security services approach to Information Sharing, (as described by MI5 chief Dame Manningham-Buller in the House of Lords on Thursday) which involves turning a blind eye to the provenance of intelligence data.

Foreign agencies don't tell us whether detainees have been tortured, and we are too polite to ask.

Manningham Buller argues that:

the desire for context will usually be subservient to the need to take action to establish the facts, in order to protect life

Scribe (of the recently renamed Into The Machine blog) discusses some of the political implications of this statement in a long and insightful post Rhetoric vs Debate: A Truly Public Strategy.

To uphold the image of saintliness, and to admit the realities only internally, behind the scenes, is even more damaging than acknowledging the state of global affairs as it really is.

In the pharmaceutical context, the regulators are faced with real ethical dilemmas - safety versus saving lives, the interests of the trial subjects against the interests of possible beneficiaries of a successful drug. We may observe various kinds of oscillation in regulatory behaviour. (See my previous posts on Drug Regulation and Trust Cycles).

Both in pharma and in security, there are strong indications of double standards here. Certainly not conducive to trust - but that's pretty obvious I guess. And it's not difficult to find hundreds more examples of double standards in public life. The question is a deeper one - how do we tackle double standards from a trust perspective?