Politics | Steve Woods

Face recognition advertising – sign the petition

04/11/2013 Steve WoodsPolitics, Tech

News broke yesterday that supermarket giant Tesco is set to install hi-tech screens that scan customers’ faces in petrol stations so that they can be fed targeted advertising. The screens will be provided by Amscreen, whose chief executive seems to think that implementing a system like “something out of Minority Report“, the dystopian science fiction film, is something of which to be proud. ( Here’s a hint for Alan Sugar’s son: that’s like recommending Nineteen Eighty-Four as a blueprint for running the United Kingdom. Ed.)

It isn’t. What is being proposed is a gross intrusion of privacy and an affront to dignity.

Naturally, this has caused a storm of outrage on social media.

Every little helps?

However, it’s not just Tesco that’s planning this. Some parts of the UK’s healthcare sector are also planning to implement it.

Fortunately, someone with some gumption and a great regard for their own and others’ privacy has set up a petition on the government’s e-petition website. The petition reads as follows:

Face recognition software is about to be used to see what adverts you are looking at. It recognises your gender, age and will be used in GP surgeries, hospitals, dentists whilst you wait for your appointment and other public areas. This is a complete invasion of privacy.

Sign the petition.

Finally, let’s not forget how George Orwell described advertising in 1936 in Keep the Aspidistra Flying:

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket.
Capita: still lost in translation?

01/11/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

The Ministry of Justice has released statistics for the use of language services in courts and tribunals for the second quarter of 2013 (PDF).

If Capita Translation & Interpreting still has a 98% performance target for filling all requests for language services for courts and tribunals, then the fact it is only filled 92% of requests in the quarter under review – as stated by the report – means they are still failing to fulfil the terms of their contract with the MoJ.

Furthermore, the report gives figures for “off-contract” language service bookings for the first time.

“Off contract” bookings are requests for translation and interpretation [sic] services made outside the Capita TI contract. Bookings for the service are made directly by the courts and tribunals – that is, not through the language service booking portal.

In Q2 2013 – the first quarter for which data is held centrally – a total of 2,929 off contract bookings were made by criminal courts, civil & family courts and tribunals. This accounted for just under 7% of all bookings made for languages services in that period.

Just over half (51%) of these bookings were made by tribunals, with a further 48% made by criminal courts.

This blog will be keeping a close eye on the figures for “off contract” bookings in future. Any increase over subsequent quarters will mean that Capita T&I are living up to their parent company’s well-deserved nickname: Crapita.
Racist van: a load of tripe

01/11/2013 Steve WoodsMedia, Oddities, Politics

Earlier this year I blogged about the Home Office’s so-called racist van (posts passim). Yesterday along with most of the national media the BBC reported that the Home Office had admitted that just 11 illegal immigrants had left the UK as a result of its ill-advised campaign.

Although the Home Office’s efforts were ill-advised and less than successful, its use of mobile billboards has inspired their use by others like the Tripe Marketing Board, as the picture below – allegedly from Lancashire – shows.
Open data still not open enough

29/10/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Data, Politics, Tech

In the week of a major international summit on government transparency in London, the Open Knowledge Foundation has published its 2013 Open Data Index, showing that governments are still not providing enough information in an accessible form to their citizens and businesses.

The UK and USA top the 2013 Index, which was compiled from community-based surveys in 70 countries. They are followed by Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands. Of the countries assessed, Cyprus, St Kitts & Nevis, the British Virgin Islands, Kenya and Burkina Faso ranked lowest. There are many countries where the governments are less open but that were not assessed because of lack of openness or a sufficiently engaged civil society. This includes 30 countries who are members of the Open Government Partnership.

The Index ranks countries based on the availability and accessibility of information in ten key areas, including government spending, election results, transport timetables, and pollution levels, and reveals that whilst some good progress is being made, much remains to be done.

Rufus Pollock, the Open Knowledge Foundation’s CEO said: “Opening up government data drives democracy, accountability and innovation. It enables citizens to know and exercise their rights, and it brings benefits across society: from transport, to education and health. There has been a welcome increase in support for open data from governments in the last few years, but this index reveals that too much valuable information is still unavailable.”

However, even open data leaders such as the UK and USA have room for improvement: for example, the USA does not provide a single consolidated and open register of corporations, whilst the UK Electoral Commission lets down the UK’s good overall performance by not allowing open reuse of UK election data.

Furthermore, there is a very disappointing degree of openness of company registers across the board: only 5 out of the 20 leading countries have even basic information available via a truly open licence and only 10 allow any form of bulk download. This information is critical for range of reasons, including tackling tax evasion and other forms of financial crime and corruption.

Under half of the key datasets in the top 20 countries are available to re-use as open data, showing that even the leading countries do not fully understand the importance of citizens and businesses being able to use, reuse and redistribute data legally and technically. This enables them to build and share commercial and non-commercial services.
Jamaica adopts GNU Health

29/10/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech
Jamaica is to become the first country in the world to adopt GNU Health, the free and open source health and hospital administration system nationwide, Joinup reports, following the signing of an agreement between the Jamaican Ministry of Health (MoH) and GNU Solidario, a NGO supplying free software for health and education.

This will be a herculean task, demanding cross-sectoral integrations from all the regions of this country. To initiate the implementation, programmers, system administrators, physicians, nurses and health records staff, as well as other public officials gathered to participate in several meetings, workshops and focus groups. The MoH Health Informatics team itself had representatives from both the national and the regional levels, as well as health records, clinical, IT and management personnel.

After an intense week, the initial guidelines for the project were designed in order to complete the first stage by the end of this year.

GNU Health provides the following functionality:
- Health Information System (Demographics, Epidemiology);
- Hospital Information System;
- Electronic Medical Records.
In addition, GNU Health has won the Best Project of Social Benefit award from the Free Software Foundation, amongst other international awards.
Wanted: English interpreters in London

27/10/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Politics

The title is true and it’s a genuine item straight from the news you couldn’t make up department: Capita Translation & Interpeting, the outfit responsible for making an utter mess of the courts and tribunals interpreting contract with the Ministry of Justice (posts passim) is seeking English interpreters for assignments in the London area.

Yes, it does sound amazing, but below is a screenshot of a page from Capita T&I’s website, captured today at 4.45 pm. English is the fifth item down the list.

English speakers wanted in London? The mind boggles.

Do you have any ideas why Crapita should need English interpreters in the capital of the country where the language originated? Put them in the comments below. 🙂

Hat tip: RPSI Linguist Lounge
UK government does something right

27/10/2013 Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Politics, Tech

The UK’s dreadful, destructive coalition government has done something right – for a change.

As part of the forthcoming Local Audit and Accountability Bill, which will be debated by MPs in the House of Commons on Monday, new rights will be granted to the press and citizens to film and report council meetings, the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) has announced.

In 2012 the government changed secondary legislation to open up councils’ executive meetings to the press and public. However, this did not apply to councils’ committee meetings or full council, nor to parish councils. Eric Pickles, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, asked councils to open up their committee meetings, but many councils are still not complying. Many councils, particularly in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire are still keeping democracy behind closed doors. Some councils had even banned local residents from recording, blogging and tweeting at council meetings. Ministers believe these councils are clinging to outdated analogue ideals in a digital age.

Mr Pickles said: “An independent local press and robust public scrutiny is essential for a healthy local democracy. We have given councils more power, but local people need to be able to hold their councils to account. I want to do more to help the new cadre of hyper-local journalists and bloggers.

“I asked for councils to open their doors, but some have slammed theirs shut, calling in the police to arrest bloggers and clinging to old-fashioned standing orders.

“This new right will be the key to helping bloggers and tweeters as well as journalists to unlocking the mysteries of local government and making it more transparent for all. My department is standing up for press freedom.”

The council chamber in Bristol’s Counts Louse (aka City Hall © G. Ferguson)

Here in Bristol, the council is well ahead of Mr. Pickles. Meetings have been webcast for years and members of the public and elected councillors freely tweet proceedings from the Counts Louse.
Stop press! Hold page 27!

24/10/2013 Steve WoodsMedia, Politics

Today’s Independent puts the christening of George Windsor into perspective: one sentence at the foot of page 27 of its dead tree version.

However, the paper’s customary lack of deference is completely ruined by the paper’s online version which features both a photo gallery and a comment piece. 🙁

A screenshot has been omitted in the interests of taste. 🙂
Bristol City Council – the developer’s friend

22/10/2013 Steve WoodsBristol, Politics, Social Media

My attention was drawn today to a curious article on the Local Government Association website from Bristol City Council.

To me it’s reminiscent of a livestock dealer crowing about the fine qualities of the beast he’s trying to sell or perhaps even a prostitute buttering up a prospective client.

There are some fine examples of jargon too.

However, this article gives me cause for concern on three counts.

Firstly, I’m paying the wages of the council’s planning wonks directly through my council tax (and indirectly through your national taxes, a portion of which gets returned to local authorities by way of government grant. Ed.), but it seems like they’re not working for the benefit of the city’s residents, but the planners seem rather concerned with working for the benefit of property developers.

This leads on to my second concern: those chummy quarterly chats with the Bristol Property Agents Association (BPAA), a cosy club whose membership is drawn from primarily from local residential and commercial property agents, as well as commercial property lawyers, developers, architects, planners, building and quantity surveyors.

Finally, there’s the offer to renegotiate Section 106 agreements. These are planning obligations under Section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 (as amended) and are a mechanism which make a development proposal acceptable in planning terms, that would not otherwise be acceptable. They are focused on site specific mitigation of the impact of development. S.106 agreements are often referred to as ‘developer contributions’ along with highway contributions and the Community Infrastructure Levy.

For a cash-strapped council, I would have thought that its priority should be squeezing as much from developers under S.106 as it can.

Evidently not.

The example of Finzels [sic] Reach given in the article is interesting. After being granted planning permission, the developers renegotiated their S.106 obligations and still went into administration last year. Perhaps their scheme was so poorly planned and financed, it should not have been given planning permission in the first place.

The article – dated 8th October 2013 – is reproduced in full below.

Bristol City Council: open for business on Section 106 agreements

Bristol City Council has an ‘open for business’ policy in relation to bringing forward development and investment in the city. Last year the Council received just over 3,000 planning applications, saying ‘yes’ to over 80 per cent of these (89 per cent of major schemes).

The council meets representatives of the Bristol Property Agents Association (BPAA) on a quarterly basis in order to discuss live issues, including delivery of development. The West of England Planning Toolkit and the Bristol Planning Protocol were jointly produced with representatives from the development sector.

Bristol has a good record of housing delivery. Its adopted Core Strategy target is for a minimum of 26,400 dwellings to be delivered between 2006 and 2026, and in the six years since 2006 over 12,700 (approximately 48 per cent) of these dwellings have been constructed. In addition, there are around 7,000 residential units currently with planning consent in the city – a significant proportion of which are yet to be commenced. In order to ensure this much needed development is brought forward, Bristol proactively seeks requests from developers to renegotiate Section 106 agreements on schemes that have become unviable since planning consent was granted. Requests are considered by the planning committee in a process that includes an open book appraisal of viability by the developer.

Outcome and impact

This approach is proving successful. Examples include Finzels Reach (a £200 million mixed-use development site in central Bristol), which is a high quality regeneration scheme on a strategically important site.

Within this context, Bristol negotiated a revised Section 106 package that met some, although not all, of the demands put forward by the developer. The revised position incentivised the developer to deliver the development to their timescale by reducing the Section 106 package by around a third (£4.5 million) if various triggers were reached.

Contact

Kate Hartas
Media and PR officer
Telephone: 0117 922 2649

Since I drew attention to the article, I’ve received the tweet shown below from Bristol City Council.

On the basis of that tweet, I have a couple of questions for Bristol City Council’s press office.

1. If Bristol City Council describes a press release bearing this month’s date as ‘ancient’, what counts as modern?

2. If that press release was released in error as you seem to be implying, is any quality control exercised by your officers before material is released for publication?

Answers will be accepted in the comments below.

Update 23/10/13: The following message has been received this morning from Bristol City Council.

Hi Steve

I’ve tried to leave a comment on your blog but get a message saying we’re blocked, probably because our work computers are behind a proxy.

In answer to your questions though, the press release you’re referring to was sent out in Sept 2012, hence our description of it as ‘pretty ancient’. The website it was published on is not in our control but that of the LGA, which recently did technical amendments to the page (not the release) which updated the automatic date shown on their site. After your tweet we drew this to their attention and asked them to remove it as it was old news and could be confusing given the apparent date. The original press release was not an error, it was sent deliberately in Sept 2012. What we can’t control is who posts it where and for how long after.

I hope this clears it up for you.

Kind regards
Tim

Tim Borrett
Service Manager, Media
Bristol City Council

Thanks Tim. That helps explain the ancient nature of the press release (which you might like to know the LGA’s webmaster still hasn’t taken down. Ed.), but not the matter of why the council’s planning department seems to be working more in the interests of property developers and not for the people of Bristol who pay their wages.
France also targeted by NSA

21/10/2013 Steve WoodsMedia, Politics, Tech

Leading French daily newspaper Le Monde reports today on how the American National Security Agency (NSA) spies on France.

The documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden also contain information about communications intercepted by the NSA in France. One image in the documents leaked by Snowden, some of which have been accessed by Le Monde reveals that the NSA recorded the data from “70.3 million French telephone calls” from 10th December 2012 to 8th January. The content of SMS (text) messages is also recorded by scanning their contents for keywords.

Quite.

Explanations in the documents consulted by Le Monde suggest that the NSA was targeting “both people suspected of links with terrorist activities and individuals targeted simply for belonging to the worlds of business, politics or the French government” under a programme codenamed US-985D. When contacted on this point, the American authorities simply referred to the statement issued on 8th June 2012 by James R. Clapper, National Intelligence Director which states that the United States Government can only collect data if it suspects activities linked to terrorism, to cyber-attacks and nuclear proliferation, according to Le Monde Informatique.

When questioned about these revelations, French Interior Minister Manuel Valls said he was going to ask the American authorities for explanations describing the revelations as “shocking”, whilst French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius has summoned the American ambassador to a meeting ((translation: to give Uncle Sam’s representative in Paris a dressing down. Ed.).

Bristol City Council: open for business on Section 106 agreements

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