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Published in ‘The Liberator’ issue 284 November 2002 ALL YOU NEED IS STEALTH New government databases are invading privacy from the age of five, warns Terri Dowty of ARCH (Action on Rights for Children in Education) Back in the 70s, admission to the rocket ship ‘Revolution’ depended on a bit more than brandishing Rizla papers and Led Zeppelin LPs. It was also de rigueur to own well-thumbed copies of ‘Brave New World’ and ‘1984’. Thirty years later, I strongly suspect that a handful of people mistook these books for some kind of Utopian social policy blueprint, blithely sailing on to a career in politics without ever having their misapprehension corrected. Before you accuse me of ‘Crimethink’, or even simple paranoia, I can only urge you to take a long, hard look at the fast-growing network of databases designed to measure, supervise and track every aspect of the rising generation’s lives, all ingeniously concealed behind apparently innocuous and well-meaning schemes, and ask: “What is this about?” To begin at the beginning: assuming that a five-year-old has successfully evaded any ‘naughty’ databases for toddlers displaying criminal tendencies, her first serious database encounter will be with the Pupil Level Annual Schools Census (or PLASC). Actually, that’s not strictly accurate: she won’t know anything about it, and nor will her parents. Following one of those increasingly familiar constitutional changes wrought by secondary legislation, the DfES this year began collecting individualised, detailed records of every state-school pupil in England and Wales, courtesy of Capita, whose technology can now simply lift pupil information straight off each school’s computer system. The PLASC database will never be deleted. In fact, it will be minced up for feeding to its monster older brother – the Connexions 13-19 database. To research Connexions is truly to travel the labyrinth. An interlinking network of databases stores information on every conceivable aspect of a teenager’s life. Consumer preferences? Sexual experience? Immunisation history? State of parents’ marriage? Political views or whether breakfast gets eaten? Look no further: the answers are a mouse-click away. In the words of the DfES, the ‘Connexions Customer Information Service’, for the running of which Capita has been given over £100m, is “a comprehensive information system... to support the Connexions Service by monitoring the status and needs of all 13-19 year olds… The key components of the proposed system are a local system to underpin each Connexions Partnership, the feeding of information from Personal Advisers and from local agencies into the CCIS and the joining-up of the local systems into a national system.” So, in the crow’s nest, we have a national database holding ‘background information’ about every young person in England plus sufficient detail to ensure that she can be properly ‘tracked’. This information is gleaned from other government databases and supplemented by each local ‘Connexions Partnership’ -a plethora of government agencies and commercial interests, overseen by the Learning and Skills Council. At this local ‘Connexions Partnership’ level, a more detailed, personal record is held. Each young person is allocated a ‘Personal Adviser’ (or PA) whose job is to sit at the centre of the web of agencies, ‘engage’ the young person in order to obtain information, and act as broker between them all. A PA receives a total of around 17 days training, mainly learning to apply the ‘APIR process’ - no, not a new colonic irrigation routine, but a way of evaluating a young person’s life in 18 specific areas and recording the results on a database accessible to the whole ‘partnership’. PAs are told to obtain written consent for this data-sharing, but it does not have to be from parents, who are apparently irrelevant to the consent process. In fact, the PA will be assessing whether they are a ‘blockage’ or not, but more of that later. Any legal notion that parents have parental responsibility for their under-16s is dispensed with in the blink of an eye. Apparently Pas can rely upon a teenager’s ‘informed consent’, a concept that regularly exercises the minds of doctors, lawyers and social workers, but is seemingly a simple issue for the DfES. Once obtained, the consent gives blanket permission for all agencies listed in section 120 of the Learning and Skills Act 2000 to access the information that the young person gives to the PA. These agencies include the local authority, health authority, Learning and Skills Council, police, probation service, youth offending team and primary care trust. In other words, a young person cannot say to her PA, “Well, OK, you can talk to my social worker about this, but not the LEA.” The basic premise behind the APIR is that a young person’s problems are ‘barriers to learning’ that must be dealt with if she is to function in the ‘knowledge economy’. One probably has to read the APIR document to appreciate the full horror of what is actually going on, and I only have space here to offer some edited highlights. Nevertheless, I would still advise anyone of a gasping disposition to remember the importance of occasional out-breaths. The first few sections begin predictably enough with ‘suggested issues to explore’ around a young person’s education, skills and ambitions, but gradually the APIR moves into slightly uncomfortable territory. Against what standards of ‘personal hygiene’ is a young person measured? Who is to say whether a friendship is ‘age-inappropriate’? What does ‘attitude to authority’ really mean? Whose authority? These pale into insignificance, though, beside sections such as ‘emotional well-being’, which recommends that the PA, fortified by three weeks of training and a mini-book on cognitive behavioural psychology, ‘explores’ whether a young person has suicidal thoughts, has been abused, self-harms or has eating disorders. One child psychiatrist to whom I have spoken describes this section as ‘trampling over landmines’. It is painful, dangerous territory that should be reserved for those who truly understand just what they are unwrapping, and who have the skills and experience to wrap it back up before the young person ventures out to face the world again. The PA must also assess the ‘capacity of parents/carers’ by finding out whether the parents are ‘role models’ or substance abusers, whether they provide a hygienic, stimulating and encouraging environment coupled with an ‘appropriate’ diet, ‘have aspirations’ for their child’ and set ‘sufficient guidelines and boundaries’. The entire section brings to mind the squeaky-clean family of the ‘Mothercare’ catalogue, viewed twelve years on. A journalist was told by a DfES spokesperson that the idea behind the questions is to remove the ‘subjectivity’. What can they mean? Are they suggesting that there is an objective standard? Did I blink and miss the introduction of the National Parenting Curriculum? Putting inappropriate flippancy aside, it is easy to miss a very serious issue tucked away in here. Whether the ‘consent’ of a young person could be deemed ‘informed’ or not - in itself a moot point - nobody is asking her parents for their consent to the second-hand gathering of their personal information. The questions about parents continue in the next section: ‘family history and functioning’, which suggests that parents’ health, education and life experiences are also fair game for the database. All trace of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights - the right to privacy - seems to have vanished. Before my blood pressure rises so sharply that my son feels forced to bring it to the attention of the Connexions service, I shall move on swiftly to Connexions database number three. Yes, really. There is still the Connexions Card to explain. At present, the Connexions Card is only for over-16s; presumably the notion of informed consent could not be stretched this far, even by Connexions. The idea is that every time a student does something ‘good’, like handing in an essay on time - or turning up at all - he is rewarded with ‘points’, a kind of electronic doggy-chocolate drop. These points are then traded on the Connexions Card website for ‘rewards’ such as cinema tickets or a pair of trainers. Pat, pat. Good Boy. How does a student receive a Connexions Card? Well, he can apply, but as only 175,000 students have done so, falling somewhat short of the 2 million target, it’s pretty clear that asking students to opt in isn’t working. Instead, Capita offers schools and colleges £1 for each student’s name, address and photograph - suggesting it could be part of the enrolment process - and then they will do the rest. ‘Incentivise your students and get paid!’ chirrups the letter sent to college staff. ‘If you have 4,000 students, we will pay you £4,000!’ Only when the student receives his card can he choose to just say no. Tucked in with the card will be a shiny leaflet that boasts: “The Connexions Card is only the first stage of the largest smartcard project in Europe. There is potential to add many other applications and online services.” Something like an ‘entitlement card’, then. The leaflet also contains the privacy policy, in print so small as to be virtually illegible to anyone but a bluebottle. This mentions in passing that every time the cardholder visits the Connexions Card website, his consumer preferences will be noted from the pages he visits and the resulting consumer profile, together with information about his views and interests gleaned from questionnaires, will be passed on to Capita’s commercial partners. The breathtakingly tiny print does assure him, however, that he can opt out of such monitoring. One young man contacted the DfES to ask if it was true that Capita passed on consumer profiles to other companies, and received a hurt reply informing him that they were only trying to help by making sure that young people were told about goods and services that might interest them. Connexions had ‘no intention of passing personal or usage information to commercial companies for their purposes’. Perish the thought! Although I could go on, that’s probably quite enough databases for one article, and certainly enough to explain my gnawing worry that those of us occupied in yelling over the ramparts about e-government, data-sharing and identity cards made one dreadful mistake: we forgot to turn around and notice what was slithering up the back stairs to the nursery. A few years ago, privacy expert Andre Bacard warned: “If I wanted to create a surveillance society, I would start by creating dossiers on kindergarten children so that the next generation could not comprehend a world without surveillance.” It seems that a politician or two was listening intently.
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