Categories
Another bunch of people who will now hate my guts

What do they know?

     

A few months ago, a dispute arose between the popular / reviled* FOI request website What Do They Know and a landlord in Bournemouth, after his address was inadvertently included in an FOI response. The landlord asked for his address to be removed, and What Do They Know refused. WDTK volunteer Richard Taylor described all this on the site, drawing attention to the fact that the address was still there. I can see no evidence that WDTK informed the landlord that they would publicise the fact that he had complained; my guess is that they did not.

The landlord complained to the ICO. Replying to the ICO on behalf of the charity, Taylor claimed that there was a legitimate interest in continued publication, but hedged his bets by stating that WDTK was exempt under DP’s S32 journalistic purposes exemption. The ICO rejected both arguments and asked WDTK to remove the original spreadsheet. Again, Taylor wrote in detail about this on the site, revealing in the process that the landlord had complained to the ICO. It’s worth noting that the ICO never reveals the identity of those who make complaints to it, and I can find no evidence that the complaint was made public anywhere else. None of my correspondence with the charity has revealed any.

A similar issue arose last year. Another council published the name of a Unison official (apparently in error) and What Do They Know refused to take it down. Again, Taylor revealed the fact that the individual had complained to the ICO, although on this occasion the ICO chose to take no action. Taylor also researched the complainant and published information about his wife on the WDTK page. Though the information Taylor gathered was clearly in the public domain, at best, it suggests an unsympathetic attitude to those who raise concerns when their data gets published on the site.

The first Data Protection principle requires Data Controllers to process data fairly, lawfully and according to a set of conditions. In this case, the data controller is UK Citizens Online Democracy, the charity which runs My Society. Data Protection requires that people must be told how their data will be used, while the only condition available to What Do They Know is legitimate interest, which must be balanced against any prejudice to the rights and freedoms of data subjects. If you complain to What Do They Know, or to the ICO about What Do They Know, they’ll make this public and a volunteer may research your family relationships and publish that too. As Taylor’s comments are always couched in terms of ‘we’ and ‘us’, I believe that that this approach is endorsed by the charity as a whole. This blows the legitimate interest argument out of the water: if a person cannot complain to either What Do They Know or the ICO without the matter being published by What Do They Know, there is clearly prejudice to their rights and freedoms.

The doomed use of S32 piqued my interest, so last month I asked What Do They Know for copies of: “any procedures or guidance available to control how personal data is obtained and published by My Society in the context of the What Do They Know website”. Of course, the charity isn’t covered by the Freedom of Information Act, but for an organisation whose public commitment to FOI and transparency verges on the obsessive, it’s not unreasonable to ask them to apply FOI standards to themselves. A month later, I received a reply:

“Personal data generally comes from users and public bodies and the site, and emails sent by it, contain lots of warnings when material is to be published online. We do our best to ensure our users, including those responding to requests at public bodies, are fully aware of what we do with the information we obtain.

NB: if you’re writing a blog post, please note how we write mySociety.”

That’s right – they didn’t give me the guidance, but Heaven Forbid I get the branding wrong. I persisted, pointing out they’d dodged the request for procedures in favour of a vague narrative answer. This time, I received a reply from Mark Cridge, the Chief Executive, setting out the decision-making process for What Do They Know (there was an opportunity for him to distance the charity from Taylor’s actions here, and he didn’t take it). On the specific request for procedures, despite the fact I’d pointed out that my request had been sidestepped, this was his reply:

We also have policies on our private internal wiki, which volunteers can refer to which provide more detailed guidance on our established policies, specific data protection guidance and key learnings from our experience of running the service for the past eight years

But he didn’t provide them, though this was what I had asked for twice. Yes, the charity is not covered by FOI and can do what it likes when annoying people like me ask them questions. No, this approach is not consistent with the values of an FOI campaigning organisation. In any case, it doesn’t matter, because I already know what the Private Wiki says about Personal Data:

Personal data in general

  1. We only consider takedown requests when we get them. We don’t pre- or post-moderate the site.
  2. The source of personal data is irrelevant, whether it is inadvertent, leaked with intent, or from someone who later develops “Google remorse”. The source of complaint/takedown request is also irrelevant, whether it comes from the data subject or a third party.
  3. Our responsibilities are therefore about deciding whether to continue to publishing or not, in line with our obligations as Data Processors, when a complaint about personal data drawn to our attention, i.e. on a case-by-case basis
  4. We have DPA Section 32 on our side, so we look at the PCC code and weigh up the public interest

The guidance proves that Taylor’s use of S32 isn’t just a randomly clutched straw. S32 is an immense exemption – it removes more or less every Data Protection requirement except security. The fact that it doesn’t apply to What Do They Know (and we know that this is the ICO’s position) isn’t the only problem. The reference to What Do They Know being ‘Data Processors’ is even more stupid. Data Processors have no data protection responsibilities – they are merely agents of someone else. There are two problems here. First, it’s impossible for the charity to be simultaneously a data controller using S32 and a data processor – they’re either one or the other. Second, the subtext of both positions is that the operation of What Do They Know exists in a vacuum – whether it’s because they’re journalists or data processors, they’re not answerable for DP issues.

The absurdity of the charity thinking it’s a data processor is plain as soon as you try to work out on whose behalf they would be operating. They’re definitely not data processors for the public authorities, who have no option but to send data to the website. It’s equally ridiculous for the charity to think that they’re Data Processors for the applicants. If this was true, UKCOD wouldn’t be allowed to remove material from requests without the applicants’ permission, applicants would be the ones dealing with the ICO over complaints, and every What Do They Know user would need a binding legal contract with the charity, or find themselves in breach of the Data Protection Act’s seventh principle.

Guidance like this could easily create a sense of immunity and entitlement – whatever happens, we’re not covered. Worse that that, the volunteer who seems to take the lead on Data Protection issues is Taylor, an anti-privacy zealot who films people without their permission, without properly identifying himself and publishing the results despite their explicit requests for him not to. When I contacted him about this intrusive behaviour earlier this year, he justified his antics with similarly vague S32 arguments. He also compared himself to Channel 4 News and Roger Cook, although I don’t think they ever stood in the rain filming a meeting through a window despite being invited inside. He also told me that he didn’t need to provide a Data Protection notification for his website because he claims the ICO says that ‘personal websites’ are exempt. They’re not, and the ICO doesn’t say so. I can’t prove that Taylor wrote the WDTK guidance, but I think it’s a safe assumption.

Whenever I write a blog like this about people who perceive themselves to be doing the right thing for the right reasons, one of the criticisms that is thrown back at me is that I am being deliberately negative. Why can’t I offer something constructive? Indeed, the last time I criticised What Do They Know, this is exactly what the former Director of My Society Tom Steinberg said. I did write a blog with some helpful suggestions of how What Do They Know could be improved, but none of my suggestions were taken up. This time around, I put my money where my mouth is. Last year, long before I corresponded with UKCOD or Taylor about these matters, I offered free Data Protection training to the volunteers at a time and venue of their convenience. I didn’t want any PR; indeed, I would have asked them to keep it a secret. Of course, I am not a cheerleader for What Do They Know – I think it can be an unhelpfully ideological enterprise, sometimes showcasing the worst aspects of FOI – but the offer was genuine and it fell by the wayside for reasons that were never explained.

So here we are. Cridge told me that the policies and procedures he didn’t want to show me will be reviewed, but how long has the above-quoted nonsense held sway? A What Do They Know volunteers can shame complainants and dig into their backgrounds, while the organisation fails to be transparent over its flawed guidance. Of course, I didn’t tell anyone at What Do They Know that I knew what the guidance said, but if transparency is such an unalloyed positive, why couldn’t I prise it out of them?

It’s impossible to blame UKCOD for the fact that public authorities sometimes inadvertently disclose information in response to FOI requests. It would be unacceptable if data was accidentally sent to a single applicant. Nevertheless, What Do They Know magnifies the problem by publishing all responses and failing to moderate what goes onto the site. I’m not convinced Richard Taylor is qualified to be involved in complex decisions about the publication or removal of personal data on behalf of a charity. I certainly don’t have confidence in a system based on wildly illogical guidance, and which allows volunteers to publish information about complainants and research their backgrounds. Complainants must be treated with respect, even if their complaints fail.

UKCOD’s management and trustees cannot hide behind the volunteer nature of What Do They Know – the website is not a naturally occurring phenomenon, and it needs to be managed and controlled. They created it, they run it, knowing that they lack the resources to proactively moderate it. In the light of this, if it is in the public interest for FOI requests to be broadcast, exactly the same approach should be taken for how What Do They Know is run.

 

(*delete as appropriate)

Categories
Another bunch of people who will now hate my guts

Fair Cop

       

The bedrock of Data Protection is fairness. You cannot gain consent without fairness. Your interests are not legitimate interests if they are secret interests. Unless you have an exemption or you claim that telling the person represents disproportionate effort (i.e. the effort of telling outweighs the actual impact), you have to tell the person whose data you are using the purposes for which their data will be used, and any other information necessary to make the processing fair.

The ICO’s Privacy Notices Code of Practice is not ambiguous, nor was its predecessor. It is impossible to read the ICO’s published guidance on fair processing without taking away the key message, consistently repeated for more than a decade: if something is surprising or objectionable, especially if it involves some kind of impact or sharing outside the organization, it should be spelled out. New-ish Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham seems to have chosen to reverse the ICO’s previously timid, unimaginative approach to the first principle with a pair of civil monetary penalties against charities. We have one each for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and the British Heart Foundation, with the promise of more to come. You might say it was unfortunate that charities are first in line rather than, say, credit reference agencies or list brokers (to be a touch tautological). It was the charity sector’s misfortune to fall under the Daily Mail’s Basilisk gaze, and they have to accept that we are where we are.

To issue a civil monetary penalty, there are three hurdles for the ICO to clear. Firstly, there must be a serious breach. Both charities used commercial companies to profile thousands (and in one case, millions) of donors, buying up data from publicly available sources* to assess their wealth and resources, they shared data with other charities whose identity they did not know via a commercial company, and in the case of the RSPCA, they bought contact details to fill in data that donors had provided. The average donor did not have any idea that this was happening. I can see there’s a problem that when everyone in the charity sector knows that wealth screening goes on, it seems normal. But I’ve been using it as an example on my training courses ever since the Mail revealed it, and bear in mind that these are often seasoned data protection professionals who know about data sharing and disclosure, attendees are invariably shocked and some cases revolted by what I tell them.

There is no doubt in my mind that this processing needed to be spelt out, and there is no doubt from the notices that it was not. Carefully selected third parties or partners have been a stupid lie in marketing for years, but not even knowing where the data goes is much worse than the usual flogging it to all comers. At least the list broker knows who he’s flogging it to, even though the only careful selection is the ability to pay.

The second hurdle is the need to show that the breach is likely to cause damage or distress to the affected data subjects. It’s been known for quite some time that the ICO was planning to take enforcement action over the Mail stories, and the gossip I heard from charities was that fines were likely. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t convinced. The Information Commissioner lost a Data Protection Tribunal appeal from Scottish Borders Council because they bungled the damage / distress element of a £250000 CMP over pension records found in recycling bins. ICO made a flawed claim that the loss of paper pension records was likely to result in identity theft, but Borders had an expert witness who could argue convincingly that this was not true. The link between the breach (the absence of a contract with the company processing the data) and the damage was broken, and the ICO lost.

But this case is different. The ICO does not need to make a link between an incident and a breach, because they are bound up together here. Both notices show that the ICO has given considerable thought to the distress angle. There is no question that the charities breached the first principle, and their only hope for an appeal is to convince the Tribunal that people would not be caused substantial distress by secret profiling and data sharing after an act of generosity. This is not science, and all I can say is that I am persuaded. But for an appeal to be successful, the charities will need to persuade a Tribunal with strong experience and knowledge of DP and PECR from the numerous (and almost exclusively doomed) marketing appeals.

The third element requires the breach to be deliberate or a situation where the charities ought reasonably to have known about the breach. As I have already said, the ICO’s position on fair processing is well known in my sector and available to anyone who can type the ICO’s web address. I think it’s possible that the charities didn’t know what they were doing was a breach, but in my opinion, this is because the Institute of Fundraising and the Fundraising Standards Board effectively acted as a firewall between charities and reality. The advice (often inaccurate and out of date) came from the IoF, and complaints about charities went to the FRSB and no further. When your code of practice is written by the people who earn their living from fundraising and most in your sector are doing the same thing as you are, it’s not hard to fool yourself into thinking it’s OK. But everybody does it’ will cut no ice with the Tribunal. The RSPCA and the BHF are not tiny charities flailing in the dark – they are massive, multi-million-pound operations with vastly greater resources than many of my clients.

Daniel Fluskey, Head of Policy for the Institute of Fundraising, whose apparent lack of experience or qualifications in Data Protection does not prevent him from writing inaccurate articles for the charity sector on GDPR, has already weighed in, saying that the ICO should be providing the specific wording that charities require: “Charities need more detail on the ICO’s view of what lawful practice looks like: what form of words would have passed the test?” The Information Commissioner is the regulator for every organisation, of every size and shape, that processes personal data. If they start writing tailored wording for charities, they will have to do it for everyone else as well. It is a ridiculous demand. I think the ICO should move on to the data pools, wealth screeners and list brokers, but if she could find the time to issue an enforcement notice on the Institute of Fundraising, forbidding them ever to speak or write on Data Protection matters again, the third sector would have a fighting chance of complying.

Besides, how hard is it to find compliant wording? Nobody – especially not the trade association for fundraisers – should be allowed to present this as a byzantine and complex task. The individual doesn’t need to know what software you’re using, or whether cookies are involved. They need to understand the purpose – what are you collecting, what are you going to do with it, who are you going to give it to? This should be presented without euphemism or waffle, but it’s when you strip out the legalistic nonsense, you see the problem. It isn’t that the poor charities were labouring under the burden of complex data protection rules. They could not comply with the Data Protection Act because what they were doing (and in RSPCA’s case, are apparently still doing) is so unattractive:

  • We will share your details with unspecified charities via a commercial company. We don’t know who they are.
  • We will buy your phone number, postal or email address from a commercial company if you have not given it to us.
  • We will use commercial companies to compile a profile of your wealth and property to work out whether to ask you for further donations. If you are likely to be worth a lot when you die, we will use this information to ask you for a bequest.

When Reactiv Media appealed their PECR penalty, the Tribunal rejected their appeal and increased the penalty. Like a lot of the spammers, they put themselves into administration to avoid paying up, but this option is not available to household name charities. If either the RSPCA or BHF appeal, they are dragging themselves deeper into the mud, and very possibly spending thousands more of donors’ money to do so. If they say that what they did wasn’t a breach, or that they couldn’t have been expected to know that it was, their officers, advice and business model will be scrutinised to a doubtlessly painful extent. The claims management company Quigley and Carter found themselves described as “feckless” and “most unimpressive” in the course of being filleted during a recent failed appeal. Do charities really want that? Even if they decide to roll the dice solely on distress, does either charity really want to acknowledge a serious breach that they knew or ought to have know about in the hope of getting the fine overturned on a technicality? Do they want ICO to call donors as witnesses?

The business model of pressure selling, TPS-busting, heavy texting, data sharing and donor-swapping adopted by some of the UK’s most celebrated charities resembles nothing so much as the activities of the claims management, PPI spammers (i.e. the scum of the earth). For all the noise and bluster on Twitter and in the charity press this week, there is an uncomfortable truth that has to be faced. The hated Daily Mail unearthed it, and the ICO has rightly acted on it. Some big charities have run an end-justifies-the-means approach to marketing and they have got away with it for a decade. Fundraisers ruled the roost, and compliance has been sidelined or ignored. Given how much money the RSPCA and the BHF have raised from fundamentally unlawful practices, they should pull back and rethink how they get donations in the future. They should ignore the Institute of Fundraising’s every word on Data Protection and PECR, and like every other charity, concentrate on reading and applying the ICO’s Code on Privacy Notices and guidance on Direct Marketing.

And right now, if there is a fundraiser sitting with the two CMP notices working out how to at the same time devise a method to raise loads of cash for their cause while complying with Data Protection and PECR, I hope they wipe the floor with everyone else.

*citation needed

The bedrock of Data Protection is fairness. You cannot gain consent without fairness. Your interests are not legitimate interests if they are secret interests. Unless you have an exemption or you claim that telling the person represents disproportionate effort (i.e. the effort of telling outweighs the actual impact), you have to tell the person whose data you are using the purposes for which their data will be used, and any other information necessary to make the processing fair.

The ICO’s Privacy Notices Code of Practice is not ambiguous, nor was its predecessor. It is impossible to read the ICO’s published guidance on fair processing without taking away the key message, consistently repeated for more than a decade: if something is surprising or objectionable, especially if it involves some kind of impact or sharing outside the organization, it should be spelled out. New-ish Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham seems to have chosen to reverse the ICO’s previously timid, unimaginative approach to the first principle with a pair of civil monetary penalties against charities. We have one each for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and the British Heart Foundation, with the promise of more to come. You might say it was unfortunate that charities are first in line rather than, say, credit reference agencies or list brokers (to be a touch tautological). It was the charity sector’s misfortune to fall under the Daily Mail’s Basilisk gaze, and they have to accept that we are where we are.

To issue a civil monetary penalty, there are three hurdles for the ICO to clear. Firstly, there must be a serious breach. Both charities used commercial companies to profile thousands (and in one case, millions) of donors, buying up data from publicly available sources* to assess their wealth and resources, they shared data with other charities whose identity they did not know via a commercial company, and in the case of the RSPCA, they bought contact details to fill in data that donors had provided. The average donor did not have any idea that this was happening. I can see there’s a problem that when everyone in the charity sector knows that wealth screening goes on, it seems normal. But I’ve been using it as an example on my training courses ever since the Mail revealed it, and bear in mind that these are often seasoned data protection professionals who know about data sharing and disclosure, attendees are invariably shocked and some cases revolted by what I tell them.

There is no doubt in my mind that this processing needed to be spelt out, and there is no doubt from the notices that it was not. Carefully selected third parties or partners has been a stupid lie in marketing for years, but not even knowing where the data goes is much worse than the usual flogging it to all comers. At least the list broker knows who he’s flogging it to, even though the only careful selection is the ability to pay.

The second hurdle is the need to show that the breach is likely to cause damage or distress to the affected data subjects. It’s been known for quite some time that the ICO was planning to take enforcement action over the Mail stories, and the gossip I heard from charities was that fines were likely. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t convinced. The Information Commissioner lost a Data Protection Tribunal appeal from Scottish Borders Council because they bungled the damage / distress element of a £250000 CMP over pension records found in recycling bins. ICO made a flawed claim that the loss of paper pension records was likely to result in identity theft, but Borders had an expert witness who could argue convincingly that this was not true. The link between the breach (the absence of a contract with the company processing the data) and the damage was broken, and the ICO lost.

But this case is different. The ICO does not need to make a link between an incident and a breach, because they are bound up together here. Both notices show that the ICO has given considerable thought to the distress angle. There is no question that the charities breached the first principle, and their only hope for an appeal is to convince the Tribunal that people would not be caused substantial distress by secret profiling and data sharing after an act of generosity. This is not science, and all I can say is that I am persuaded. But for an appeal to be successful, the charities will need to persuade a Tribunal with strong experience and knowledge of DP and PECR from the numerous (and almost exclusively doomed) marketing appeals.

The third element requires the breach to be deliberate or a situation where the charities ought reasonably to have known about the breach. As I have already said, the ICO’s position on fair processing is well known in my sector and available to anyone who can type the ICO’s web address. I think it’s possible that the charities didn’t know what they were doing was a breach, but in my opinion, this is because the Institute of Fundraising and the Fundraising Standards Board effectively acted as a firewall between charities and reality. The advice (often inaccurate and out of date) came from the IoF, and complaints about charities went to the FRSB and no further. When your code of practice is written by the people who earn their living from fundraising and most in your sector are doing the same thing as you are, it’s not hard to fool yourself into thinking it’s OK. But ‘everybody does it’ will cut no ice with the Tribunal. The RSPCA and the BHF are not tiny charities flailing in the dark – they are massive, multi-million pound operations with vastly greater resources than many of my clients.

Daniel Fluskey, head of Policy for the Institute of Fundraising, whose apparent lack of experience or qualifications in Data Protection does not prevent him from writing inaccurate articles for the charity sector on GDPR, has already weighed in, saying that the ICO should be providing the specific wording that charities require: “Charities need more detail on the ICO’s view of what lawful practice looks like: what form of words would have passed the test?” The Information Commissioner is the regulator for every organisation, of every size and shape, that processes personal data. If they start writing tailored wording for charities, they will have to do it for everyone else as well. It is a ridiculous demand. I think the ICO should move on to the data pools, wealth screeners and list brokers, but if she could find the time to issue an enforcement notice on the Institute of Fundraising, forbidding them ever to speak or write on Data Protection matters again, the third sector would have a fighting chance of complying.

Besides, how hard is it to find compliant wording? Nobody – especially not the trade association for fundraisers – should be allowed to present this as a byzantine and complex task. The individual doesn’t need to know what software you’re using, or whether cookies are involved. They need to understand the purpose – what are you collecting, what are you going to do with it, who are you going to give it to? This should be presented without euphemism or waffle, but it’s when you strip out the legalistic nonsense, you see the problem. It isn’t that the poor charities were labouring under the burden of complex data protection rules. They could not comply with the Data Protection Act because what they were doing (and in RSPCA’s case, are apparently still doing) is so unattractive:

  • We will share your details with unspecified charities via a commercial company. We don’t know who they are.
  • We will buy your phone number, postal or email address from a commercial company if you have not given it to us.
  • We will use commercial companies to compile a profile of your wealth and property to work out whether to ask you for further donations. If you are likely to be worth a lot when you die, we will use this information to ask you for a bequest.

When Reactiv Media appealed their PECR penalty, the Tribunal rejected their appeal and increased the penalty. Like a lot of the spammers, they put themselves into administration to avoid paying up, but this option is not available to household name charities. If either the RSPCA or BHF appeal, they are dragging themselves deeper into the mud, and very possibly spending thousands more of donors’ money to do so. If they say that what they did wasn’t a breach, or that they couldn’t have been expected to know that it was, their officers, advice and business model will be scrutinised to a doubtlessly painful extent. The claims management company Quigley and Carter found themselves described as “feckless” and “most unimpressive” in the course of being filleted during a recent failed appeal. Do charities really want that? Even if they decide to roll the dice solely on distress, does either charity really want to acknowledge a serious breach that they knew or ought to have know about in the hope of getting the fine overturned on a technicality? Do they want ICO to call donors as witnesses?

The business model of pressure selling, TPS-busting, heavy texting, data sharing and donor-swapping adopted by some of the UK’s most celebrated charities resembles nothing so much as the activities of the claims management, PPI spammers (i.e. the scum of the earth). For all the noise and bluster on Twitter and in the charity press this week, there is an uncomfortable truth that has to be faced. The hated Daily Mail unearthed it, and the ICO has rightly acted on it. Some big charities have run an end-justifies-the-means approach to marketing and they have got away with it for a decade. Fundraisers ruled the roost, and compliance has been sidelined or ignored. Given how much money the RSPCA and the BHF have raised from fundamentally unlawful practices, they should pull back and rethink how they get donations in the future. They should ignore the Institute of Fundraising’s every word on Data Protection and PECR, and like every other charity, concentrate on reading and applying the ICO’s Code on Privacy Notices and guidance on Direct Marketing.

And right now, if there is a fundraiser sitting with the two CMP notices working out how to at the same time devise a method to raise loads of cash for their cause while complying with Data Protection and PECR, I hope they wipe the floor with everyone else.

*citation needed

Participates from the Chicago Federation of LaborChicago Jobs with Justice, Nabisco 600, and the religious community, including IWJ Board Chair Pastor Doug Mork, delivered powerful messages of support for Nabisco workers and the campaign to end the outsourcing of union jobs by Nabisco/Mondelēz.

Check out the event in the video below!