Apple will appeal against the UK government’s demand to access customers’ data this week at a secret high court hearing, due to take place today. The appeal will be heard by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), the independent judicial body that considers complaints about the conduct of the UK intelligence services. The ITP (I’m sure I bought their second album) took the unusual step of publishing a notification of a closed-door hearing, scheduled for 10:30am on Friday 14 March, after leaks revealed Apple’s intention to appeal. Privacy rights groups have called for the hearing to take place in public. On Thursday, a joint letter from Open Rights Group, Big Brother Watch, and Index on Censorship was sent to The Rt Hon Lord Justice Singh, President of the IPT, inviting him to “make this process more transparent by opening this hearing to the public.” The US Congress also got in on the act, accusing the UK government of undermining Congressional oversight and restricting free speech of US companies. At the time of writing, it’s still going ahead behind closed doors.
At the beginning of the week, Peter Kyle, the Science, Innovation and Technology Secretary, hailed AI as a win-win technology that could cut call centre waiting times in half for people trying to access public services like HMRC, DVLA and Citizens Advice. Which, in the case of the latter, could be handy for all those civil servants who will find themselves out of a job when AI replaces the work of government officials. Because on Thursday, Peter Kyle said it is ‘almost certain’ that civil service numbers will be cut as part of the government’s AI efficiency blitz. PM Keir Starmer announced his plans for AI efficiencies, which he says could save £45bn across government departments, in a speech in Hull. All these announcements about government efficiencies and not a chainsaw-wielding billionaire in sight…
Speaking of which, a US civil servant with 30 years’ experience who abruptly retired in February after refusing the not-actually-a-real-department Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) access to sensitive and confidential data, has warned of the risk of that data ‘leaking into the wrong hands’. Meanwhile, an article in the Washington Post has highlighted the amount of taxpayer-funded data that has been deleted or is inaccessible, leaving a trail of 404 pages in its wake. Information that helps Americans make decisions on topics like climate, sexual orientation and gender, natural hazards, crime, and health, has disappeared, with contracts for scheduled data gathering at the Social Security Administration and Education Department cancelled by Doge.
We’re delighted to tell you that we’ve updated our Open Data Maturity Model. Published this week, the model is a way to assess how well an organisation publishes and consumes open data, and identifies actions for improvement. The main updates from the original model focus on maintaining global open data best practices and include relevant thinking on data literacy, data ethics, and responsible data stewardship. It's free to use, and there is also a digital tool, so check it out.
And finally…a woman from Dunfermline in Scotland was left shocked after an Apple voice-to-text service on her phone translated a voicemail. She’d left her car with a local garage to be serviced, and when the garage called her and left a message, the AI-powered transcription asked if she was able to have sex, before calling her a piece of sh*t. Peter Bell, a professor of speech technology at the University of Edinburgh, suggested the hiccup was likely the effect of background noise and the way the garage worker spoke, hindering the speech-to-text engine… rather than anything intrinsically, y’know, Scottish.
Until next time.
David and Jo
PS: We’ve partnered with Pearson to bring you our upcoming live online course, Bias and Fairness in Data and AI on the 18 March. The course is hosted on O’Reilly Learning; register today or sign up for a free trial the week of class to join!
