The lack of scrutiny and governance over how the U.K. government uses data will almost certainly become an (even more) urgent issue as it scrabbles towards Brexit.
I honestly don’t see how any Centre for Data Ethics can be effective without taking govt use of data into consideration. The ways govt stewards and shapes the data of those in its care is a confusion of competence and capability, ideology, politics and ethics.
Any functioning modern democracy needs process and governance to untangle this and to set out what is acceptable and unacceptable, regardless of political approach. The great recent flowering of UK institutions hasn’t given us that yet.
Just thinking about 2019 is already making me feel tired.
Maybe buy the civil servant in your life a copy of Weapons of Math Destruction by @mathbabedotorg and make sure they read it this weekend. If Facebook has shown us anything, it’s that seemingly inconsequential data that are can become incredibly powerful. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_o…
