Date: 2023-04-17
Lucy Powell: My hon. Friend makes two very good points, and I agree with her on both. I will address both points in my speech. Taken together, these changes, alongside the Secretary of State's sweeping new powers, will tip the balance away from individuals and workers towards companies, which will be able to collect far more data for many more purposes. For example, the Bill could have a huge impact on workers' rights. There are ever more ways of tracking workers, from algorithmic management to recruitment by AI. People are even being line managed by AI, with holiday allocation, the assignment of roles and the determination of performance being decided by algorithm. This is most serious when a low rating triggers discipline or dismissal. Transparency and accountability are particularly important given the power imbalance between some employers and workers, but the Bill threatens to undermine them. If a person does not even know that surveillance or algorithms are being used to determine their performance, they cannot challenge it. If their privacy is being infringed  to monitor their work, that is a harm in itself. If a worker's data is being monetised by their company, they might not even know about it, let alone see a cut. The Bill, in its current form, undermines workers' ability to find out what data is held about them and how it is being used. The Government should look at this again. The main problem, however, is not what is in the Bill but, rather, what is not. Although privacy is, of course, a key issue in data regulation, it is not the only issue. Seeing regulation only through the lens of privacy can obscure all the ways that data can be used and can impact on communities. In modern data processing, our data is not only used to make decisions about us individually but pooled together to analyse trends and predict behaviours across a whole population. Using huge amounts of data, companies can predict and influence our behaviour. From Netflix recommendations to recent examples of surge pricing in music and sports ticketing, to the monitoring of covid outbreaks, the true power of data is in how it can be analysed and deployed. This means the impact as well as the potential harms of data are felt well beyond the individual level. Moreover, as we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Rebecca Long Bailey), the algorithms that analyse data often replicate and further entrench society's biases. Facial recognition that is trained on mostly white faces will more likely misidentify a black face--something that I know the parliamentary channel sometimes struggles with. AI language bots produce results that reflect the biases and limitations of their creators and the data on which they are trained. This Bill does not take on any of these community and societal harms. Who is responsible when the different ways of collecting and using data harm certain groups or society as a whole? As well as the harms, data analytics offers huge opportunities for public good, as we have heard. Opening up data can ensure that scientists, public services, small businesses and citizens can use data to improve all our lives. For example, Greater Manchester has, over the years, linked data across a multitude of public services to hugely improve our early years services, but this was done entirely locally and in the face of huge barriers. Making systems and platforms interoperable could ensure that consumers can switch services to find the best deal, and it could support smaller businesses to compete with existing giants. Establishing infrastructure such as a national research cloud and data trusts could help small businesses and not-for-profit organisations access data and compete with the giants. Citymapper is a great example, as it used Transport for London's open data to build a competitor to Google Maps in London. Open approaches to data will also provide better oversight of how companies use algorithms, and of the impact on the rest of us. Finally, where are the measures to boost public trust? After the debacle of the exam algorithms and the mishandling of GP data, which led millions of people to withdraw their consent, and with workers feeling the brunt but none of the benefits of surveillance and performance management, we are facing a crisis in public trust. Rather than increasing control over and participation in how our data is used, the Bill is removing even the narrow privacy-based protections we already have. In all those regards, it is a huge missed opportunity. To conclude, with algorithms increasingly making important decisions about how we live and work, data protection has become ever more important to ensure that people have knowledge, control, confidence and trust in how and why data is being used. A data Bill is needed, but we need one that looks towards the future and harnesses the potential of data to grow our economy and improve our lives. Instead, this piecemeal Bill tinkers around the edges, weakens our existing data protection regime and could put our EU adequacy agreement at risk. We look forward to addressing some of those serious shortcomings in Committee.