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Speaker A: Hello and welcome to Password, where we’re decoding technology to find out what it means to us in our daily lives. I’m Peter Warren, and you can’t get into my smartphone because my password is my fingerprint. So I was shocked to learn that some people take their partner’s hand while they’re asleep and quietly use their sleeping partner’s finger to unlock their mobile phone and snoop on their messages. Meanwhile, in Tel Aviv, there’s a new pedestrian crossing that can sense a smartphone hovering over an LED strip in the pavement and then sends a red or a green light to the smartphone to tell its owner whether or not it’s safe to cross. They don’t even have to look up from the little screen. Silicon Valley is reacting with a shrug to the revelation that Google disbanded its artificial intelligence ethics board after a petition from employees opposed its membership. And in Brussels, pro-Brexit Conservative MEP Dan Dalton has just steered an anti-internet terrorism law through its first stage in the European Parliament. And at Westminster, Brexit or not, there’s a new white paper on internet harms. What does it all mean? Well, let’s start in the bedroom with the furtive fingerprint under the duvet. Solicitor Jacqueline Major from Hodges Allen Jones She tells me that this behaviour was revealed by a survey of people involved in family law cases.
Speaker D: So what this survey shows is we have a high proportion of people who are snooping by checking phones. 35% have admitted to doing so, with 4 in 10 saying that they do it at least once a week. Quite staggeringly, we even have 1 in 5 men who’ve admitted to using their sleeping partner’s finger to gain access to the mobile in order for them to go in and see what they can find. So the stats are quite high in terms of what people are doing.
Speaker A: So is this— this is basically something that people have always felt, you know, going back to the time of Madame Bovary and things like that, that people think that their partner’s up to something, and now that they can prove it, or are people using the mobile phones to find out whether somebody’s being unfaithful just because the technology now exists?
Speaker D: I think that we’re a long way removed from the lipstick on the collar, but actually if there is a suspicion there, that is what is giving rise to people using technology to be able to snoop. And there’s no doubt about it that technology means there are far more ways to do this now than there ever have been. I think we, you know, we live in a world of social media. We live in a world where if you see your partner in some ambiguous situation situation, maybe tagged in a post or with someone in a photograph, and it gives rise to a suspicion that actually something’s going on, then it may well be that people will resort to snooping. And we’ve had so many scandals hit the headlines over the last few years as well of exactly just this. Look at Andy Gray recently, the football pundit whose wife found stuff on his phone. Going back a few years, we had Tiger Woods, we had Ashley Cole, we had Eva Longoria’s husband. So this is the sort of thing that permeates into the public’s mind and And so if an individual thinks their partner is doing something, it’s an easy way to start checking on them.
Speaker A: A lot of people would argue that if you’re that suspicious of your partner, that really your relationship’s in quite a lot of trouble already.
Speaker D: It certainly shows a massive level of distrust as to why you’re doing this in the first place, and it’s usually not the first thing that would give rise to that level of distrust. But then again, our survey does show that of the people that are checking, over half discovered actual evidence of cheating, and 45% then went on to end the relationship. So it is happening. And I think that the other really telling part of this survey is that there is a broad public opinion on what actually constitutes cheating. You know, you mentioned the sort of Madame Bovary and the full-blown affair. It’s not even that these days. 56% of people would agree that sexting, sending explicit texts or images, would amount to cheating. But at the bottom end, you’ve got 1 in 9 saying that putting kisses at the end of messages constitutes a betrayal. So it sort of depends on how the person who finds this stuff actually perceives it in terms of what it means in their relationship.
Speaker A: I mean, is this just a mark of the times that everything is surveilled now, everybody is politically correct?
Speaker D: I think politically incorrect is part of the problem if you look at the stats of the actual number that are doing this sort of cheating. I mean, it’s a mark of the times times, but I think distrust, adultery, affairs, relationships, well, that’s as old as the hills. You know, we’ve always had that. What the technology enables people to do is find it easier, and from our survey, 9 out of 10 people believe that mobile technology and apps makes cheating easier.
Speaker A: Right, so isn’t there though something a little— I mean, how are we going to define cheating? Some people would say that somebody intruding into their mobile device is a form of cheating. That’s not exactly playing fair.
Speaker D: Well, it’s not a form of cheating, but it’s definitely a form of perhaps harassment. So yeah, let’s turn the tables for a second and imagine you’re the sleeping partner that wakes up and finds your finger on that phone, or indeed if your partner confronts you and says, ‘I have been checking your phone and I can see you have been flirting or sexting or whatever.’ How’s that going to make you feel? What if you discover that your partner is checking up on you in this way and actually you you are completely clean and innocent and there’s nothing at all that they have found. That in itself is going to give rise to you distrusting your partner as to why they’re doing this. So you can look at it both ways.
Speaker A: And it’s potentially leaving them open to legal action, isn’t it? Because under the new law about gaslighting, you’re not allowed to try to control your partner in this way. This could be seen as a mechanism to try to impose your will on someone.
Speaker D: I think that definitely controlling behaviour is something that is very much more becoming recognised as the wrong thing to do in a relationship, and it is, you know, this whole gaslighting, the terminology around it, and the increasing awareness of people thinking, hmm, am I in that kind of relationship? Is that what’s going on in my relationship? So if you find that your partner is snooping on you in this way, that is kind of a red flag as to the sort of relationship that you could be in.
Speaker A: As a lawyer, what do you do when you’re confronted with this material?
Speaker D: Well, usually it’s from the point of view that that relationship has actually broken down, because by the time people go to seek family advice, it generally means that they are looking to end that relationship. And as I said earlier, the trend that we’re seeing is people coming in with evidence of this as to why the marriage or the cohabitation has broken down, and then it’s, it’s what we do about it. In the case of a divorce, if you don’t have evidence of a full-blown affair, the adultery, then you have the unreasonable behaviour and you can use it as an improper relationship. Or alternatively, if you’re the one that’s found that you are on the receiving end of snooping, you can use that as controlling behaviour. So you can cite this sort of thing as evidence of why the relationship broke down, although we do encourage people not to use it as a weapon. It might be something we still have to do by law, to allege fault, but we all know— good family lawyers know— this is a vulnerable time for people. Heartbreak is horrid. It’s not just about a legal process. It’s tough. Get through it with the least amount of acrimony if you can.
Speaker A: And this stands up in court, does it? Because some people would claim this was unfairly gained information. If I am recording you I meant to tell you that I’m recording you.
Speaker D: I suppose recording is a whole different area in itself as to whether you can record people and how you use it. You know, this is a very— the family courts aren’t the criminal courts, so there’s a very different legal background to how this information or how this evidence is used. And as I said, we’re not trying to use it as a massive weapon against the other party. We’re just trying to use it to enable a relationship to end with as much dignity as you possibly can. But it does go back to why are people doing this and the fact that this is causing the ending of relationships. This sort of distrust and this sort of snooping is causing the end of relationships.
Speaker A: There’s no law against cheating on your partner or controlling them by hacking into their private online world, but still, as Jacqueline Major says, the damage is done. It’s not the smartphone phone’s fault, and the manufacturers have done their best to make it secure. Can we say the same for online platforms? As I speak, white nationalist groups are meeting at Turku in Finland. The gathering brings together far-right groups in the USA, Ukraine, and across Europe, just weeks after a terrorist murdered 50 people and injured 50 more at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. He livestreamed the outrage through Facebook groups and YouTube. The platforms were criticized afterwards as morally bankrupt for allowing this content to reach a worldwide audience. But the European Parliament was already on the case, and on the 8th of April, Dan Dalton MEP, a Conservative and former Warwickshire cricketer, brought a new law to the powerful LIBE committee.
Speaker C: In terms of what are the obligations for the authorities, when they pick up content that they deem to be contrary, to be illegal terrorist content effectively, they need to issue an order to the platform. Now, the platform will then in most cases have an hour to take down that content. Now, there are a few things that we have added in the Parliament to this. For example, in the case of the first time a service gets an order, Instead of an hour, in this case, there is a 12-hour period in which they are able to take action, get their services, get their systems ready to be able to take down the order.
Speaker A: It passed, and when it’s ratified, it will mean tech platforms have just 1 hour to remove pro-terrorist content before they face prosecution. Fines of up to 4% of global turnover will act as a deterrent. And this is just the latest in a series of measures that the LIB Committee has passed with British Labour MEP Claude Morose in the chair. He’s even interrogated the CEO of Facebook, the elusive Mark Zuckerberg, pushing him to do more to protect users from harmful content.
Speaker E: Yeah, I think the approach to Facebook, we looked at both offline and online, and there should be some kind of some kind of measurement of both and they should be seen together. So on Facebook regulation, we looked at— let’s take elections for example. Offline regulation should happen with online. The quick answer to that. So the measures we take have to be in both areas and people have to understand that. So it’s not just a question of just doing everything online with Facebook. You have to deal with offline issues as well in terms of elections and regulation.
Speaker A: And also though, if something is race hate, if I walk down the street and I’m shouting out something that inspires racial hatred, same should happen online?
Speaker E: Yes. I mean, there should be— now it’s difficult to have direct equivalence because of the unique nature of the internet. But as much as possible, there should be some kind of equivalence. So racial hatred content which incites racial hatred, there should be some kind of equivalence. Now you are saying shouting down the street. Of course people should always understand that that in itself is very difficult to regulate and prosecute. And this is what sometimes people forget. They always think, well, it is going to be very difficult to deal with racists on Twitter and racists on Facebook.. But you know, in the offline world, you can’t say anything, you’ll get prosecuted. Actually, you don’t get prosecuted. There are very, very few prosecutions for incitement to racial hatred. Very, very few prosecutions for racial attacks. I mean, there can be exemplary sentencing where racism was a factor and so on. But they are very few and far between.
Speaker A: Do you think that we need an internet regulator? And if so, do you think it should be one of the current regulators or a new body? Do you think we need to move pretty fast and pull together some of the current regulators like, say, in the UK, Ofcom and the ICO, the Information Commissioner’s Office, and give them something because there’s a need to do something quickly?
Speaker E: Yeah, I think we should be quick. I favor the idea of bringing them together, giving them more powers, of course, because the ICO, for example, in the case of Facebook, was, I thought, was very effective in what it said. It was respected in what it was saying. It was making a real effort, which was noted by people. But the fines were derisory, absolutely derisory. I mean, not even pocket change for a company like Facebook.
Speaker A: Well, that’s a really interesting point, isn’t it? Because, you know, what’s the right balance between voluntary and compulsory duties, i.e., codes of conduct and regulation? At the moment, as you say, a lot of these fines are derisory. But prior to— I was at a thing in the House of Lords on the 21st of January where Google was saying it had been very good about operating these voluntary codes of conduct, which to my mind they haven’t been.
Speaker E: My perception, having now dealt with a lot of the big companies over the past, let’s say, 10 years, and in great detail in the last 5 years, would be to say that you can’t accept too much voluntary change and voluntary codes on these big companies. They will move towards monetization. Their scale is so vast that they can manage individual small governments. They can take them in their stride. They really have vast resources. Because they are communicators, they can have this added value power of of communication. So in a sense, you have to have the big stick of threatened potential regulation. One of the reasons the EU has been reasonably okay in at least getting Facebook to the table— and we realize the weakness of not getting them to do enough— but one of the reasons, for example, Zuckerberg at least came to the EU rather than ignoring, say, for example, the British House of Commons although I understand the weaknesses in what happened when he came to the EU. But the difference was that at least in the EU there are levers which threaten Facebook’s continued dominance if they don’t do the right thing. So there are tax powers, there are monopoly breakup powers, there are all sorts of other regulatory powers. Now they can be used, but of course It’s the implied threat if Facebook doesn’t clean up its own act. And of course, my view is that there will have to be regulatory powers. I do favor what you’ve said, which is I would say you don’t lose the expertise of some of the bodies who, like the Information Commissioner, have been trying to do the right thing, but just need to come together in a kind of new body with better powers.— you know, being able to find more.
Speaker A: Holding the owners of technology platforms accountable for the harm they might facilitate is not easy, as we saw from the fact that Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly refused to appear before MPs in the British House of Commons. But just imagine how hard it would be if the state itself owned all the social media channels and video sharing platforms and search engines and email service providers. Actually, you don’t have to imagine. It’s already happening in China. Isabel Hilton, the award-winning journalist who founded the China Dialogue news agency, told me how the Chinese party-state uses the internet to reward good behavior and punish transgressions.
Speaker F: 5 years ago, when Xi Jinping came to power, he took a decision to turn China away from the political liberalization that it was at that point undergoing and turned back towards ideological conformity. So no power sharing, party domination of pretty much all aspects of life, including business, behavior, career opportunities, education, etc., etc. And this at a time when China has a growing urbanized middle class, which in other places, in other Asian Tigers, in South Korea or Taiwan, for example, led to political reform. They came out of dictatorships and into more representative systems. When all that began to happen, the party looked at this, decided that it wasn’t going to let that happen. So then you have the challenge of how do you stop it happening? How do you control what people think, what they want? How do you manage to ensure that the party stays in command? So then the third factor, of course, is the digital revolution. Now, at first, when that arrived in China, it seemed like it was for the first time in China creating a public space where people could express their views, where they could make connections, they could do all the things that we have now become used to doing online. And Chinese net users absolutely took to it with enthusiasm. There was an explosion of creativity, of opinion sharing, of all kinds of things which began with the arrival of the internet. But then of course the state noticed this and the state responded to it. And the way the state responded was to think, well, how do we use this to our advantage and in effect turn it from a space in which people were free to express opinions and do what they wanted into a space which enhanced the state’s capacity to monitor, to track, and to control what people thought and did. If you add to that the fact that there was a complete absence of protection in China, so no kind of assumption of privacy, no rule of law, no barrier to state control or state monitoring of your online or indeed your offline life, but the online life was the one which offered the greater possibilities, plus the rapid growth of local Chinese providers, not least because the government made sure that international providers didn’t get a foothold in China. So you have companies such as Alibaba, which developed a whole comprehensive suite of what you might call life solutions, from online payments to mapping to social interactions, which meant that people really use their phones for everything in China, not just because it’s convenient to do so, but increasingly It’s very difficult not to do so. If you don’t have a Chinese bank account and you visit China, you can often find that you can’t pay for things because people no longer take cash. So this has developed very rapidly, and what that means is that the companies and the state that has access to all the company data can track absolutely everything. They can track who you know, what you say, what you read, what you buy, where you go, all those things., and they can take a view based on that data on whether you are a threat to the party or whether you are a reliable supporter of the party. And if you combine this with surveillance cameras and facial recognition, which have also been very rapidly developed, then there really is no escape from state surveillance. So given the ambition of the party to nip any kind of protest or insurrection in the bud, and the long-standing conviction that the party can condition behaviour in its favour, plus the fact that such systems always need an enemy, and what you get is the potential for calibrated coercion and really massive abuse of individual rights. So if you are deemed to have, or found to have through surveillance cameras, something as small as jaywalking, then you might get a sanction. You might indeed see your picture displayed massively at a road junction, you know, inducing public shame. And that’s a relatively small example, but it goes right up to the kind of thing that you’re seeing in Xinjiang, in this, you know, very troubled western region of China, where absolutely every aspect of life, from religion to private conversations, is monitored, tracked, and, and sanctions are delivered on the basis of that evidence. So it really is kind of Big Brother, you know, Orwell meets the digital age in a truly, truly singular way, shall we say.
Speaker A: Don’t the Chinese— aren’t the Chinese representing this as a very good thing? They’re representing this as this is making everybody model citizens. Can you—
Speaker F: how can you be upset with this? Well, you know, that’s fine. That’s certainly how the Party would represent it, and that indeed is how they represented labor camps and other aspects of coercion. And for a lot of Chinese, if you don’t fall foul of the system, life is convenient. You could argue that it lowers crime because, you know, everything becomes much harder, any kind of transgression becomes much harder. The problem is in the potential for abuse, or indeed in the actual abuse that people would argue is happening in Xinjiang. Because where you don’t have the protection of a legal state, how do you prevent simply a corrupt local official exploiting this potential for massive abuse of power? You know, I don’t like so-and-so, or I want his house, or his daughter was rude to me. The potentials for for abuse on a personal level are enormous, the potential for abuse on an institutional and a state level are even greater. You really can’t coerce people into being model citizens without abuse. That’s kind of one definition of slavery, really.
Speaker A: And one of the things that a lot of people aren’t aware of is that China is one of the few places— I think it’s probably the only place in the world— where the entire technological ecosystem, for want of a better phrase, is run by the state. You’ve got a search engine company which is run by the state, social media that’s run by the state. Huawei run the internal telecommunications. They’ve gone to a great deal of trouble to make sure that China runs its own infrastructure, haven’t they?
Speaker F: Well, they’ve, they’ve done that by excluding others. I mean, Google was the most popular search engine in China, but these days— you know, using any Google product in China drives you insane. You know, the search engine is blocked, you know, mostly your mail is blocked, I mean, almost anything. And they did that in order to foster the growth of Baidu, which is now going abroad. And so that is now the biggest search engine in China. When you say run by the state, I would just calibrate that slightly, because a lot of these begin as nominally private companies, but the fact is that in China you cannot thrive, particularly in the telecom sector, without the approval of the Party and without collaborating with the Party. So you simply wouldn’t get anywhere. So that although companies such as Huawei say, “We are a private company,” the fact is, you know, they would be shut down if they refused to collaborate with the party state or with the intelligence services. And there is legislation to that effect in China, you know, mandating the cooperation of any Chinese entity with the intelligence services. So it’s, it’s a thin fiction. And these companies have been encouraged to get as large as they have grown by a series of state measures which effectively screened them from international competition. Which subsidized them, which gave them sweetheart deals in terms of land for their factories or installations, in terms of loans from the state-owned enterprises, and so on. So although they would argue, and they do argue, that they’re not actually run by the state, it’s part of a range of measures that the party-state uses to exert control over them. So for example, in internet censorship, The Party doesn’t do it all itself, but it mandates the internet providers, the service providers, to implement the censorship. So all these companies have to employ large numbers of people in order to take down content which is flagged up sometimes by censorship entities, which are state censorship entities, or sometimes they spot it themselves and they kind of get nervous and they take it down. Down. It’s— these lines are quite fuzzy, but they’re quite effective because there’s a great deal of self-censorship now in these companies who are afraid that they, you know, they don’t want to get into trouble, so they err on the side of caution. And then there is an increasingly paranoid state which is ratcheting up the censorship week by week.
Speaker A: I mean, just to give some sort of detail on that, we were passed some documents about 3 weeks ago which showed that the initial 117 founders of Huawei were all linked to the Chinese intelligence services, every single one.
Speaker F: You astonish me. I mean, yeah, and, and, you know, they, they claim that, you know, we’re just owned by our workers, just like John Lewis. And, and actually, if you try to, if you try to examine, you know, what does that mean, and How are decisions taken? And, you know, what is the actual structure? You hit a bit of a wall quite quickly. So you’d have to be pretty naive to imagine that Huawei was not, you know, joined at the hip with the party state.
Speaker A: I mean, this does sound like the absolute technological hell, doesn’t it? This does sound like this is every bad thing that you can do with technology. You can get the technology going into people’s lives. You can monitor them. You can control them, and you can suck out any sort of information you can about their behavior.
Speaker F: Well, I think that’s what happens when there are no protections for users. And so people— it’s very hard to operate without being in the digital world these days, and the price that you pay in China is potentially very high indeed. And yes, I mean, we thought that this was— or at least the digital world in the beginning seemed like glorious freedom, but actually it could turn out to be the biggest prison that any of us could imagine.
Speaker A: A chilling thought. Potentially, China’s use of the internet could be as far as internet harm can go. After this on Resonance FM, you can hear DJ Ritu and today Alvarado step into the studio with their playful mix of Brazilian coro. As she presents A World in London. A world in your hand is literally what an online device gives you. Yet the regulations that govern online content are numerous and scattered geographically all over the place. Technically, the massive servers and undersea cables that deliver internet services across the globe are administered and policed by an international committee called ICANN. The content they carry has no such global oversight. To address this issue, Alvin Carpio and a small group of volunteers have set up the Fourth Group, aiming to make the Fourth Industrial Revolution less painful and more democratic than the first three. Carpio organized a citizens’ inquiry into the Tottenham riots and then won a fellowship from Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity University. You’ll remember that Ray Kurzweil thinks the singularity will arrive in 2027, when humans and online machines become one. Among other things, Alvin used his fellowship to found the Fourth Group and recently gathered 176,000 signatures for a petition to Mark Zuckerberg urging Facebook to end the misuse of users’ data. So I asked him, Alvin that is, what the group considers to be the worst internet harms.
Speaker C: And this very specific thing is that it’s a huge range. It can be something as seemingly basic as, you know, addiction to computer games. And now there’s— that’s quite complex because what is addiction? Does it really cause harm, or is that a focus on a particular thing? You know, are you addicted to computer because you’re at work every single day looking at a screen But of course, if it then leads to addiction where you’re impacting your health and your physiology and your ability to interact with other people, now that’s one other form of harm. And then there’s a kind of like real malicious type of harm where the intended consequence is about doing wrong to others, like recruitment of terrorists through social media posts. So I think it’s a hard question to answer because there is such a range. But I think, is it a good thing that now people are looking at the impact of the internet through the harm lens, I think it is, then the question is, how do you regulate? It’s been helpful to move from the ethics of artificial intelligence, the internet, and so forth, to now thinking about the real practical impacts. And then hopefully that will lead then to some practical solutions.
Speaker A: Take the thing that you just mentioned about computer games. Computer games use psychologists to make them more compulsive. But by the same token, those people who are very successful at making films also want to make their films compulsive because they want them to be watched. One of the harms that people have been or are going to be looking into, according to a group of pan-European psychologists that we’ve spoken to, one of the harms that they’ve been looking into is box sets. What this really comes down to is how well disciplined we are against media or things that have been deliberately made to be interesting.
Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, it’s a really good point just in terms of how novel all of this really is. And thinking back to the days when I used to play Game Boy and Mario and, you know, something which was now rudimentary in terms of technology available in your hands to, you know, the virtual reality and augmented reality capabilities of gaming today. But I think the way I look at it is like this. At one point, we had no knowledge or little knowledge or recorded knowledge of the animals out there in the world. And somebody then recorded it, noted it down, noticed, noted the characteristics, noted the relationships between all of those animals. And then we got a better sense of the animal kingdom and so forth and so forth. I think in a similar way, we’re at a stage now where a lot of the new tech is novel. There are similarities again, but they are often very novel simply because of the speed of the internet, the accessibility and cheapness of certain technologies, and the availability of data. And so in a way, we’re building this encyclopedia of these new harms, which we might have assumed previously, but we’re building an evidence base. And by building the evidence base of the descriptions of what these harms are, we can then, like a doctor, kind of look at some of the symptoms and the potential responses to these. So I think we’re— it’s a very new time. There are similarities and there are some things which are old, but in a way it’s unique simply because of the reasons I’ve mentioned. And we’re at that evidence-gathering stage, and I assume in 5 to 10 years, hopefully there will be a bit more of, uh, real action. And when I say real action, I’m not talking about platitudes from politicians or business leaders. I’m talking about real legislative bite on some of these things, whether it be about breaking up companies, banning certain technologies. It doesn’t need to all be bad, but really focusing on what brings good to humanity rather than harm is something which I hope we see in the next 5-10 years. And that’s what we’re fighting for at The Fourth Group, to kind of try and preempt what those problems might be and then act upon citizens’ interests to shape the Fourth Industrial Revolution in those interests.
Speaker A: So do we need a new super regulator, and do we need new super regulations? Because that’s what your argument almost inevitably goes towards, doesn’t it?
Speaker C: Yeah, so I mean, the underlying thesis of the organization and the community we are building at the Fourth Group is that the Fourth Industrial Revolution has created new power structures, it’s created new ways of living and interacting with each other and ways of working.. And for the first time ever have we been able to actually think about and address global issues because we can communicate with each other across boundaries. And so despite what’s happening, particularly in the UK where national sovereignty and national interest is the main kind of idea and moving away from regional governments is a thing, the fact is, you know, in 1942 there were 9, I think 9 democracies in 2008 there were 87, and now there’s 123 democracies. Democracy is not dying, as some people have said. And actually, for us, we believe there needs to be a democratization of global governance, i.e., this whole idea of supranational institutions as well as kind of regulations can only happen if we have a democratic, globally elected type of institution. Now, we could argue that the United Nations is playing somewhat of a role in this, also with meetings between politicians at the G8, G20, and so forth. But I ask folk, like, why is it that we’ve never been able to vote on these issues? Why have we never been able to vote for people who attend Davos? Now, that’s obviously a very separate question because Davos serves a particular set of interests and reasons for existing. But my point is that the next evolution of democracy has to be global simply because we’re dealing with global issues. Issues like climate change, like the impact of tech companies, no matter where you are, Silicon Valley has reach. And so this idea that there might be a need for global governance and global policy, my big issue is that there are currently no democratic institutions to enable that to happen. And so that’s what we’re trying to push for now. It’s of course a radical idea, but at one point there were many utopias like giving women the vote or ending slavery. And we do believe actually democracy is a very important— plays an important role in bringing progress. And for us to really hold these companies to account, we need to have some form of democratic globalism. But won’t this just inevitably create another supranational organization that’s unwieldy and won’t make decisions very quickly? I mean, of course there are risks, and the history of democracy is that just because you’re a democracy doesn’t mean you’re going to be a good one. Now, yes, there are 123 democracies worldwide, but of course there is a scale of how successful each has been. That is not to say then that we should stop democracy or the growth or evolution of democracy. I mean, for us, we’re just trying to test this. You know, last week we had a vote across our community from 10 different countries with our members, a very small experiment, and we’re 130 founding members. But that’s what we’re testing. We’re trying to test it through practice to see whether or not there are common concerns. And therefore a space for common regulation, common policies, or effectively common laws which can follow on from the tradition of the Human Rights Declaration 70 years ago. So of course it could turn sour, but like anything new, the aim is to try and do good with it. And I think for the first time in history it’s been possible. So the question is, you know, will it happen? We’ve seen through history that it takes a war or something of a huge event which causes people to try and think of, you know, solutions, grand solutions. But hopefully we can find a way of addressing these things in peacetime.
Speaker A: Alvin Carpio, his new movement, the Fourth Group, has volunteers all over the world from Bogotá to Bratislava, and they run hackathons and produce truth videos with the aim of awakening people’s consciousness about what’s happening in the online world. They might sound like idealists. Cybersecurity expert Professor Andrew Jones of the University of Hertfordshire, however, wants to sound a note of caution here. He points out that the business model of the internet tech giants is all about making money, and people invent new apps and gadgets and hope that a big player like Google will spot them and buy them out, all helping create an enormous Google world that it will be difficult to compete with?
Speaker B: I don’t think ethics comes into it at that point. I think ethics is something that comes as it matures. I think you’re absolutely right at the early incubation stage, it’s about making money and identifying a path to make money. And this is in truth part of the whole issue that ethics doesn’t get involved. And who can, you know, if the guy who thought about putting using a camera on a mobile phone had been able to envisage the effect it would have and the consequences. We went through the phase of things like happy slapping. You know, we have criminals recording their acts on the phone. I don’t think anybody envisaged that, and I’m quite sure that many of the large tech companies did not foresee and could not foresee how it would develop. So that’s why I say it’s about the maturity of it. Technologies, disruptive technologies, have interesting side effects, you know, and fake news, cyberbullying, the cybercrime. I’m quite sure early days of the internet when the concept was to allow people to communicate Nobody had thought forward to, well, criminals are going to use this in the future.
Speaker A: But that’s another danger though, isn’t it? Because if you’ve got this Silicon Valley incubator environment, what everybody’s looking to do— when I was there, that’s what they see appear to be looking to do— was to develop something that Google would buy for billions of pounds. So, so people are basically just continually building the Google infrastructure. They’re coming up with the programs that build the trees in Googleland?
Speaker B: Yeah, because Google is one of those, you know, I wouldn’t pick on them specifically, but they’re one of those that is now so big and has so much, is so cash-rich that, yes, people aspire to be bought by them because it’s a quick route to significant cash, a significant return on the investment. But remember, that’s Silicon Valley in America, and not everything happens there.
Speaker A: Maybe we look elsewhere for the disruptive technologies. To sort some of this out, the government’s calling for the creation of a new super regulator, probably based on Ofcom. That super regulator presumably will say to the internet companies, the large technology companies, there is a problem in this particular area, sort it out.
Speaker B: Do you think that’s the right relationship? I think that’s one relationship, but I actually think, you know, to be effective, we need to look to places like Europe, which has the power of a larger community. In UK, will our super regulator have massive impact?
Speaker A: I don’t know. Nonetheless, the British Parliament when it has accomplished some kind of Brexit, will get back to a normal timetable and deal with the Internet Harms White Paper, which recommends, as we’ve heard, a super regulator. What might that look like? Who better to ask this question than Ian Moss, one of the creators of Ofcom, the communications and broadcasting regulator, and now Director of Public Affairs at the British Phonographic Industry, BPI. How does he envisage the new regulator’s framework to save us from online harms?
Speaker G: I think this is the thing I’ve always found quite difficult, and I’ve said for many years, is that we have a society, a set of rules, because we believe there are certain behaviors and certain things that we think are not acceptable behavior, whether that’s from the things we don’t think that people should act like to the right up to the criminal end and all those sorts of things. And, and so we have those rules in place for very good reason. And just because there is a different opportunity or place for those to take place doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t want to apply the same rules. And I think for a long time the internet community got away with this sort of, we’re different and it’s— and you can’t do anything and there can’t be any rules. And I just don’t think it really washes anymore, and we know there have to be. And I think we also got to a point where we say we can’t just let— we can’t expect the internet companies to set those rules themselves. And in some ways, that’s not fair to let them set them themselves. We as a country, as a government, have to set those rules so they know what is expected of them and they can comply with them.
Speaker A: I think that’s where this government have got, and I think that’s the right place to be. But it would appear that rather than us regulating, rather than the countries regulating, rather than the EC regulating, what people are saying is that they should come up with a code of conduct and enforce it on themselves.
Speaker G: I think the time’s passed for that, though. And, you know, it would have been perfectly plausible if they started out with a sort of reduction of harm by design mentality, but they started out with a mentality and very aggressively pushed it through legislatures across the world to say we should not have any responsibility for anything that goes on on our platforms. We are just mere hosts. We don’t get involved. All we do is, you know, set the playground for everyone to play in. And I think that that’s not worked. And I think their involvement is far more substantial than they claimed at the start of all of this. Their knowledge of what goes on in their networks is far greater. And then I think you get into how do you police it. And like any other situation, and I always say it’s like a football game, fights will happen at football games. We still expect football clubs to police and and secure the grounds. It doesn’t mean that they’ll stop every bad bit of behavior, but they’ll do their best to reduce it as much as they can. And broadly, it works. And that’s, I think, what we’re saying to the internet platforms. We don’t expect you to deal with everything, but you have to put more resource into it, and you have to take it more seriously, and you have to actively involve yourselves in reducing the problem.
Speaker A: Aren’t you simply singling them out? I mean, at the moment, for example, some van has pulled up over the other side of the road from me and it’s making a noise that’s coming in on my recording of this interview. And that’s just the price of life. So if you start to say you as a technology company you’ve got a special responsibility. Well, they’re just going to simply turn around and say, hang on a moment, what about all of those supermarkets that are knocking out all of that plastic that’s having an impact on us?
Speaker G: Yeah. And there’s going to be regulations brought in. I think they were just passed in the EU that will get them to reduce single-use plastics. We do these things all the time. There’s been duty of care kind of responsibilities for companies and employers for a very long time. And I don’t think we are asking them to do anything any different than we would expect of, say, an employer to say whilst people are on your platform, they should have a reasonable expectation you’re doing what they can to make sure that harm does not come to you. And I don’t think that’s an unreasonable thing to say of any company.
Speaker A: But how far does this go? Because you could arguably say that the duty of care, the internet harm has come from public demand for a service. And you could also, to go to your point about crime, one of the biggest problems to do with computer crime, cybercrime, is the consumer, because the consumers are unaware of the ramifications of the technology that they’re using. And so they become unwitting victims to cybercrime, and they actually become the conduit of a lot of the damage that’s going on.
Speaker G: There are a lot of different aspects to the crime and consumers’ understanding of the technology that are part of that. You’re never going to have a situation where there is complete knowledge on the consumer side and complete understanding, although of course over time people have got a lot more savvy about giving their details, giving their passwords, all those sorts of things. I don’t think what’s being done here is actually that radically new. I think it’s bringing what is a new way of interacting into what is commonly known or commonly decided to be a genuinely sensible kind of regulatory framework. So I think, like everything, like every technology, we get a bit sparkly-eyed about the technology We don’t think about what it’s being used for, and what it’s being used for is generally the same as technologies before it. It’s getting content to people and it’s getting people to interact, but it does so in a way that is very different and very much easier than anything that’s come before it. So if you want to get somebody to be able to watch videos so they understand how to commit offenses of terror. Well, that’s always existed, but it existed on DVD and before that VHS and so on. It’s just that this gives it a very easy distribution mechanism. So it’s not new issues, it’s just a new distribution.
Speaker A: Okay, well, let’s pick up on one of the things that is relevant in terms of these new copyright days and new copyright law has just been passed by the EU: box sets. There’s a pan-European group of scientists who are currently looking at Internet harms, and they say box sets and binge watching is a big issue. They say that that is having a very, very harmful effect upon people because they’re staying up all night watching huge amounts of videos that they wouldn’t normally have watched.
Speaker G: It’s not something I know very much about, to be honest, but I always have some skepticism about those that get concerned about the new technologies is driving everyone to distraction. I think I imagine somebody said 200 years ago, these books, people are sitting up all night reading them instead of sleeping.
Speaker A: Oddly, they actually did. 100 or so years ago, there was a very sort of stern piece written in one of the national newspapers in which it was saying that there was this terrible device, it was going to get into your homes, it was very, very invasive, and we should all look out for it, and it was called the telephone.
Speaker G: Exactly. But of course, I mean, looking at the telephone, the telephone’s always had telecoms regulation, has always had the concept of malicious transmissions right back from the Telecoms Act in ’84. There was a concern that people would use the telephone network to cause harm to other people, so it’s always been an offence. What they believed though was that the telecoms company wasn’t a party to that offence, which is of course true. It’s a difference of whether you have absolutely no concept of what’s going on on your technology or whether you do have a concept.
Speaker A: Mark Zuckerberg says that he wants us to sort of flesh out the regulations and flesh out the regulatory environment that he should work to. But one of the issues here, and this has been very well made during the making of this program, is you have companies companies that want to make money. That’s their raison d’être. So one of the points that’s been made is Silicon Valley’s ethics are to do with making money.
Speaker G: How are you going to regulate that? I don’t think anyone needs to regulate the ethic of making money. I don’t think that’s what this is about. What it is about is saying that governments Governments have the right to put reasonable responsibilities on companies to make efforts to reduce harm, and it’s something that the Silicon Valley companies have managed to avoid, partly because of the speed at which they grew, but partly because of the kind of American approach to regulation and freedom of speech, that we have a very different tradition of in the UK and, and in the European Union for that matter.
Speaker A: So what can Brits expect from this new law that’s coming down the pipe? Liberal peer Lord Clement-Jones, who chairs the House of Lords Select Committee on artificial intelligence, which produced a largely optimistic report last year, said that it’s about the positive potential of AI to transform the British economy. Does he really want to bring in a super regulator with harsh new penalties for the big technology platforms platforms that deliver our beloved social media?
Speaker H: What is appropriate is to have a duty of care, a broad duty of care that actually tells the social media platforms these are the kinds of harms you should be trying to prevent, and you have a code, you expect them to police it themselves, and if they don’t police it, they get fined. So there is quite a degree of discretion for the social media platforms in terms of how they carry out their duties.
Speaker A: They can construct some pretty sophisticated algorithms nowadays. Okay, so if you say code of conduct, I mean, a lot of people just say that’s entirely nebulous. How on earth is that going to work? You’ve got organizations like Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg suggested that he be regulated— or sorry, that Facebook be regulated— only a few days ago. But then it was pointed out that he was saying that it should be regulated in a sort of Facebook-y way, was what one commentator said, which seems suggest that it’s regulation in his interest. So if you give them a code of conduct, then it’ll be a code of conduct in their interest?
Speaker H: No, I don’t think so. I think it’ll be a code of conduct that’ll be in the interests of the British public. You know, I’m not saying it wider than that. I mean, I would love to have a situation where there was a sort of global code of conduct. I don’t think we’re going to get there, but I certainly think we should start in the UK and probably in the European European Union with establishing some ground rules where harm shouldn’t be created, you know, beyond purely the criminal offenses which they’re liable for currently. But this whole area is, you know, in need of an overhaul. You know, what we’ve had up to date is a situation where the social media companies have been able to plead that they are, quote, a mere conduit, i.e., all they do is transmit what is put on platforms. They aren’t— they’re not responsible for any content at all. And that is, you know, I’m afraid, a completely false situation. And we can’t let that go on for much longer.
Speaker A: And I think the government now recognize that, and their white paper will reflect that. The government white paper did fall short of saying that there should be a breakup of these large technology companies. It did fall slightly short of saying that they were utter publishers?
Speaker H: Oh yes, and I think that will continue to be the case, and I don’t think I’m suggesting that they should be total publishers. They do not post all their own material. You know, the material that goes up on social media is third-party material, but they have a duty to prevent harms where it is apparent, and that’s what they, you know, need to be given a duty to do.
Speaker A: Aren’t you going into some funny territory here? Because you’re asking people to define what harms are. You’re asking them, in a sense, to be philosophical. You’re asking them to come up with ethics. They’re going to have to sit there and think about what is right and wrong. And to be perfectly honest, everybody, every one of us, has a lot of trouble with that question.
Speaker H: Well, yes, but then that’s what, that’s what parliamentarians do every day of the week. I mean, you know, we have to. We’ve got the digital economy We’ve got data protection duties, we’ve got consumer protection rights, all kinds of things. Every day of the week we have to draw lines between behavior that is, if you like, regulatable and behavior that isn’t, and behavior that’s criminal and behavior that isn’t. You know, all the time. This is what lawyers themselves advise on, you know, which side of the line do people fall on.
Speaker A: But that’s, that’s the job for you, and the companies will say, hang on, we’re not moralists, we’re not ethicists, we’re not philosophers.
Speaker H: Well, every company doing business has to make decisions about the ethical nature of what it does. You know, you can’t be like the bookmakers, for instance. They’ve just withdrawn their new product which allowed up to £500 stakes. Things like that. The companies do have have to make these kinds of decisions. And of course, as we move into new technology, artificial intelligence and so on and so forth, they will have to behave in an ethical fashion, make judgments accordingly.
Speaker A: So, no. So those are Lord Clement-Jones’s thoughts. The government seem to have gone a little further. They demand clear terms and conditions understandable by children, potentially large fines and possible jail terms for senior executives. It all sounds good. Tough on harm and tough on the causes of harm. Transparent tech companies, a crackdown on terrorists, and a move to protect the young, the weak, and the vulnerable. Though oddly, it doesn’t pick out cybercrime, the first internet harm, and one that does tend to have a finger in many of the other harms. For example, the technology companies are all involved in the movement of spam mail. —one of the bedrocks of cybercrime targeted at the gullible. Some 23 years ago, I asked a hacker called Fungus the Bogeyman why cybercrime had prospered. His response was simple: I went to an inner London comprehensive. When the internet arrived, I thought, wow, everyone from here is online now, and so is everyone from every other school, and they are all stupid. The white paper allows for groups of people to unite in super complaints or class actions, possibly something that the terms and conditions rule out at present. Removing that protection from the tech giants would really focus their attention on internet harm. So now we have a white paper on online harms that foresees an independent regulator and a promised code of ethics. And we have until July to send our views to the government on which new rules and penalties will help to keep us safe and which may do more harm than good. That’s all from this edition of Password with me, Peter Wyatt. The producer was Blue Buffery and Jane Wyatt wrote the script. We’ll be back next month with more ramifications of technology. Thanks for listening. This program has been brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you liked what you heard and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm.
