A committee of MPs has been told of the danger of connected technology and data mining by experts who said Britain should bring in regulation to protect individuals and especially workers.
The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee is investigating “the impacts of the increasing prevalence of smart and connected technology” such as Alexa, Siri, and Fitbits.
Matthew Cole, a post-doctoral researcher at the Fairwork Project, told the committee on Tuesday that Britain had become a leader in the data industry.
But he said: “We need to also lead on ensuring that tech is used to benefit the most amount of people and that means putting things in place like enforcement mechanisms, data protection … and also not allowing data brokers to sell on that data.”
Cole said several recent studies had showed that even if data is anonymised or encrypted, it can be reverse engineered.
He said: “There’s ways of reverse engineering that in fact, I was just reading a paper that in a new method found that anonymised data can be reverse engineered to identify 99 percent of the people. So these are some real risks both to workers and society at large that we need to have at the forefront of our agenda.”
Cole said it was not clear if the world was going through a “fourth industrial revolution” or if it was a “paradigm shift.”
But he said: “If you look at the growth of the major tech companies, whether it be Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Alibaba, any of these huge players, they’re supporting an entire ecosystem of AI and data-based and cloud-based companies that are shifting the infrastructures of society and therefore the infrastructures of work.”
Cole said the UK government “could do much better” when it came to ensuring data protection for workers and also for customers.
‘Relationship Between Suppliers and Consumers Are … More Fluid’
Asieh Hosseini Tabaghdehi, a senior lecturer in strategy and business economics at Brunel University in London, said she had done research which suggested there were many benefits of connected technology.
She said: “The service providers are both connected now to the consumers. So they can act a lot quicker. They can respond to the feedback to the complaints and everything a lot faster. This means the relationship between suppliers and consumers are becoming a lot more fluid, better, and more observed and monitored by both parties.”
“So therefore, increasingly the precise impact on consumers’ experience did have a good impact on consumers’ decision making. So I strongly believe that digitalisation and connected technology can impact on better production and more efficient production,” said Tabaghdehi.
Conservative MP and former minister, Damian Green, asked the panel of experts if they agreed with the pressure group Big Brother Watch which, he said, believes it is false that connected technology improves productivity.
Efpraxia Zamani, a senior lecturer in information systems at the University of Sheffield, nodded in response and said: “Yes. Because something that cannot be included directly in industry reports and these kinds of measurements we have is that the technology will always be used in new ways, as a result of their users, ingenuity, and innovation.”
“And when we try to do the assessment of how much productivity we gain from this device or the other system, we cannot account for all these valid new cases that have not been considered by the technology designer because it’s simply possible,” she added.
She concluded: “We continuously appropriate devices; we use them in ways nobody expected us to. Quite often we develop workarounds with regards to the system specifications and security implemented in XYZ device in order to increase our productivity, but unless we’re very opposed to purposefully looking for that, we won’t be able to measure it.”
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Chris Summers is a UK-based journalist covering a wide range of national stories, with a particular interest in crime, policing and the law.
