I recently took part in a debate at the BBC's Free Thinking festival in Liverpool on whether or not technology empowers people. It soon emerged that I was to take on the role of technophile against the rest of the panel – Phil Redmond of Brookside/Hollyoaks fame, historian Jonathan Sawday and ex-hacker Robert Schifreen.
The most emotive theme of the debate was technology's use as a monitoring tool, and the spectre of a Big Brother society. This was alluded to early on in the debate when each panellist was asked to sit in a chair at the front of the stage. One by one, as the spotlight turned on us, we were asked by a robotic, disembodied voice, "Who does technology put in charge?"
Issues thrown up for discussion included the use of RFID systems; security weaknesses in web-based CCTV cameras; and whether the government and industry are exploiting technology to their own rather than users' advantages. The Information Commissioner's recent surveillance society report also cropped up, in which Richard Thomas warned we are now being tracked all the time.
The government came off as a worse offender than industry in this regard. The general consensus of the panel was that at least with commerce, practices like supermarket loyalty cards are voluntary – unlike government schemes such as the proposed national ID card.
As someone who writes about IT for a living, and is quite happy to admit to a high reliance on gadgets, my views tended to be much kinder to IT advances than those of the other panellists. One argued that the use of credit cards is now pretty much compulsory, meaning people can't avoid having their data collected by marketing companies, for example, but I'd maintain that people really worried about this can still use cash. However, regarding government IT, I was much more in line with the rest of the panel.
The main conclusion and one that everyone could agree on was that technology is too often deployed just because it exists, and that the government should take a step back and think about whether it is really needed before embarking on projects. One audience member cited a local council that has earmarked around £1m for yet more CCTV cameras to be installed in an area where it's impossible to get an NHS dentist. The government would do well to heed these comments as it pushes on with the ID cards scheme.
Tony Blair wrote a column in the Daily Telegraph last week playing down the
criticism levelled at the proposals. He contended that past failures in
government IT projects are "an argument not to drop the scheme, but to ensure it
is done well".
Based on the consensus in Liverpool, it seems more an argument for the
government to let citizens play a part in deciding whether it is better to spend
billions on yet another potential failed project that has disputable value even
if it does work, or focus on more pressing issues such as increasing the NHS
dentist register.
