honestlyreal

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Blue light? Red light.

Yesterday afternoon this tweet [screengrab above, in case it gets deleted] popped into my stream, as a result of a RT from a friend. This friend has thousands of followers, and tends to pick content with care, so it caught my eye.

I’ve been interested in this type of message for a long time now. I wrote a piece over three years ago about the consequences of asking people, en masse, to amplify a lost person message – along with some suggestions on safeguards that might help us hang to some of the benefits but minimise wasted time and miscommunication.

I took a closer look at the account behind this tweet, @policeuk, because of its name. UK policing is one of those sectors that has its own .uk domain (like nhs.uk, mod.uk etc). In the case of the police, the website Police.UK has a highly distinctive branding as a primary source of official crime and policing information online.

So, not unreasonably, I concluded that @policeuk was so similar to the “official” brand as to be of genuine concern.

What is the @policeuk account? It claims to be a “Breaking news” feed – amplifying stories related to policing. Nothing wrong with that by itself. There are tons of accounts doing similar things. Good luck to them. But the weight given by “RT @policeuk…” seems to be a pretty powerful accelerant. That tweet’s currently had over 1,200 RTs.

Sadly, in this case, it was all too late. A body had been found, but no update or clarification had followed. That’s bad. Perhaps worse, a few hours before this tweet was sent, the real police had issued a press release asking the public not to get involved in search activity, adding to the irresponsibility of this tweet. (Yes, that’s right, that link 404s. Humberside have clearly adopted the Argyll & Bute school of media handling. For their full press release archive, try here. Oh, wait…)

Anyway, the RTing continued uncontrollably…

Back to the @policeuk account. Its output is pretty odd. There are links to random news stories which may or may not be “police”-related. (Most news stories, are of course, in one way of another). But there’s also some weird stuff asking followers to comment on The Sun and Those Nude Harry Pics. [Update 28 Aug: this tweet has since been deleted]

And perhaps oddest of all is the account bio: #AntiWinsorNetwork we are not associated with the police in any way shape or form. tweets by @gonzomedia [NB. that disassociation statement was added after I started making noises about the account yesterday]

AntiWinsorNetwork? Wossat then? As far as I’ve established, it’s a grass roots policing community campaigning brand that arose at the time of the Winsor review into police pay and conditions.

Read that bio again: “we use the tag of a policing-related campaign, but have no connection…” er, m’kay…

And who are @gonzomedia? A self-proclaimed media organisation – with a website that doesn’t work. Hmm. They’re not this GonzoMedia, anyway.

So is this really worth making a fuss about? Some worthless content gets RTd a lot? Lots of people waste lots of time on the internet? That’s hardly news. And it’s not going to be stopped by a few whiny tweets and a blog post.

Except this one really is a problem. There’s a definite quality-by-association issue. This is the gem of a “retraction” that was finally published:

And is it beyond the realms of possibility that @policeuk could become recognised as a twitter brand that people start to turn to for help, or to report Serious Things? I think it’s highly possible. And that would be criminal.

If the GonzoMedia(.co.uk) people really want to build their brand using like this, I suggest:

  • change the account name to avoid the “PoliceUK” formulation
  • put something along the lines of NewsFeed into the account name
  • take the word “Police” off the account profile picture (and preferably the pseudo-emergency-services design)
  • either lose the hashtag or the claim that the account isn’t police-related from the bio – both together are incoherent
  • [optional] have some sort of content strategy, and quality control
  • And if they don’t do these things, I fully expect the Home Office, ACPO, NPIA, or any of a number of other relevant organisations (who are all now aware of this issue) to have it taken down sharpish. I haven’t got going on the Facebook page, but it’s going to need similar scrutiny.

    It’s not a question of free speech.

    It’s much more important than that. [pace Shankly]

    ——–

    Update 28 Aug, 8am

    I see that during the night @policeuk/Breaking News (Police) announced its demise*. Well, not quite. It announced on Twitter that it wasn’t tweeting any more, because of my post. And on Facebook it did the same, but went a bit further and invited its contacts to give their opinions on whether it should stay or not. (The comments make fascinating reading.)

    Personally, I’m saddened. I had no idea they’d suffered “5 days of constant abuse and campaigns” by trolls. After all, I only spotted the account about 5pm on Sunday afternoon. Whoever gave them the other 3½ days of grief should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves!

    Read this slowly, Facebook visitors and other newcomers: there is no trolling. There is no abuse. There is a bit of gentle piss-taking, because this is the internet.

    And there is a challenge to its branding, based solely on the way the word “police” is being used, with some clear suggestions on what it could do to fix this and carry on exactly as it has been. I also suggest that if it chooses not to, it’s very likely to attract official interest. Pointing those things out is not “trolling“.

    Oh, I’ve just noticed the Facebook URL. facebook.com/policeuk? No, I don’t think so. That should go too. I’m sure NPIA have an eye on this one too now.

    If you are now desperately missing real police output, can I suggest you go and find your local force page? They look like this. Or a Twitter account like this? The latter all have, or should have, a blue tick indicating they are genuine. Or go and get your newsy fix from, well, a real news organisation. There are plenty about. They have (mostly) responsible approaches to reporting, fact-checking, timely coverage and that sort of stuff. And if you want to bellyache about coppers with like-minded people, you’ll find a space.

    (Interestingly, having seen some references in those comments, it seems the same outfit is responsible for Breaking News Teesside. Fine. No problems with that. It seems hugely popular. It’s giving people a space to talk [cough] about local Newsy things. It’s another thing that the internet is there for. So it’s not like they don’t know how to do this.)

    And if all those are too official, or propaganda-ish, do please set up your own bear-pit online space. Just don’t put “police” in the name.

    All clear?

    *if visiting from a Facebook link, this means “end”.

    ——–

    A final update: 29 Aug, 11am

    Well, there we are. After a whole 24 hours** of flouncing and muting, they’re back. Not sure who these “haters” are, to be honest. Critics, well, that’s a different matter.

    Now, is this my problem? Nah. I suspect there are quite a few within the policing community who are now taking a good look at the branding issues involved. Over to them. I will await with interest what happens, and will post any updates here.

    I guess there are some for whom an issue like this could become an overwhelming, illiberal, ranting crusade. But I’m not one of them.

    **though in the compressed timescales of the guy behind these, he probably thinks he put his toys down for at least a month.

    ——–

    Really, really final update: 11pm

    Fascinating link from February 2012, from the Mirror. Read it for yourselves. But note that even a national newspaper (ok, not the brightest, but hey) said: “they wormed their way into a police Twitter account…” Well. That looks like form, as they say. And perhaps a piece of evidence to support what the case set out above. They were hacked, they say. Yeah, yeah, tell that to the judge.

    The underpin

    A quick post on identity, written after seeing Dave Birch’s marvellous TEDx talk on identity, but rooted in a Nasty Thought about identity assurance (proving things about you to be true) that’s been troubling me for a while.

    To summarise current thinking on this (but do watch Dave’s talk): old identity approaches are hopelessly flawed because they try to recreate a clunky, record-based model of Who You Are: as a list, or a database, of lots of things about YOU: from name, address, date of birth, fingerprints (and whatever reference numbers anyone – typically but not necessarily the government – want to sling in there), etc. etc.

    Enlightened identity thinking says: bugger that – most of the time it’s not important WHO you are, merely that you can prove a certain thing to be true for a certain purpose. So a baby-faced boozer only needs to demonstrate AGE>18. A council service user may need to show POSTCODE=BN****. This is sometimes called “authentication, not identification”, and there’s a whole marvellous book about this by Jim Harper which is basically a bible for sensible, non-Big-Brothery approaches to these issues.

    Reassuringly, these principles are found within the current strategy of both the US and UK governments. Which is ace. And to be wholly applauded. (There is a lot more to these strategies than just the idea of authentication over identification, by the way, but that isn’t the focus of this post.)

    No more will you have to haul out a document showing that you buy electricity in order to rent a DVD. No more does your passport have to be hijacked to confirm you can start a job. All the machinery used to hold and prove things about you can be turned upside down: instead, you control what you share with whomever you need to prove something to. Provided there is a “binding” of something about you (maybe your face, or your fingerprint) to the fact that needs to be asserted, then you get what you need without having to BE any particular person.

    If that thing about binding sounds a bit spooky, look more closely at this scheme. It’s been used to verify drinking age in pubs. The important bit is that there’s no central database anywhere that a (future!) malicious government can use to attach other “facts” about you. Or that can be corrupted or lost or misused etc. etc. It simply links some data points from a fingerprint to the fact that needs to be proven (age), and serves that up neatly and securely when required. But read up for yourself how it works. It’s well thought of and has the blessing of some who really do make a habit of tearing strips off dodgy approaches to personal data and biometrics.

    But this post isn’t about clever new ways of doing things differently, and better.

    It’s about a problem that will still exist. It’s about something that underpins many rather trivial, low-value transactions and life events.

    Sometimes it’s not enough just to satisfy a particular information need for a transaction, like verifying an address, for example. Well, it is when everything goes right. But not when things go wrong. Because if things go wrong, and you want to take action, you want to underpin the information you’ve got with something else: the ability to tie the transaction back to a particular individual. Yes, someone with a name, an address, and lots of other things that the police and criminal justice systems know you by. So how quickly will Dave’s “no names” approach actually stand up in practice, in any situation where some future recourse may occur?

    Because the one recourse you ultimately have is to take action which might involve a fine, an endorsement, even ultimately imprisonment. And these are things you can’t do if you only know AGE>18 or DRIVING TEST PASSED 1985, LICENCE CLEAN. Many things you can do “as somebody else” – like paying for something – but you can’t be banged up as someone else. That’s the “underpinning” bit.

    The car hire company really does need to know who you are. Perhaps not to satisfy insurance requirements, or some other aspect of the up-front transaction. But just in case you disappear… Even for something as low value as a DVD rental… And if you bump your car into someone else’s, swap details and get an odd feeling about your opposite number, are you going to be more or less likely to insist on police attendance if they pull out a decent-looking driving licence for you to note down, or scratch it out in pencil on a Post-it note? Even peer-to-peer we use underpinning as part of our understanding of trust.

    Our old-fashioned “hard identifiers” are hugely important in backing things up in these cases of trust and liability. It’s that thing where it’s much more important that the system is designed for things that go wrong, rather than things that go right.

    Realistically, what will actually change if we move towards an authentication culture? Will we still fall back on the same old props to do that critical underpinning of trust? It’s a hole that I perceive in these concepts of individual-controlled information.

    I’d love to hear your thoughts.

    It kinda depends…

    The BIS consultation on the next stage of midata has been announced. Obviously it’s a no-brainer that making nasty old companies do more, for free, for nice-us-the-consumers is a Good Thing, innit? Well, maybe… But it kinda depends how widely you look at the issues involved. I wrote about some of these last year.

    Below is my answer to question 1: (in which I do that thing of tucking most of my exam answers into the opening statement, then just referring back to them for the next 20-odd questions)

    Q1. Do you agree with the principles of midata? Have you any comments on the proposed approach?

    The principles fall clearly into the “what’s not to like?” camp, at least if viewed solely from the customer perspective. As that is the most appealing perspective, it generally gets the most attention. But the issues behind these principles are wider: they set up a tension around a business’ freedom to manage customer relationships in a way that maximises shareholder interests.

    All business processes reflect this tension to some extent: call-centres and automated call handling didn’t arise with the primary goal of improving customer experience, for example. The business-customer relationship is subject to some regulation, of course, such as fair trading provisions. So we are not starting from any point of ideological purity about state intervention in business, nor of the preferment of consumer rights over that of businesses.

    Midata will place an additional cost burden on businesses (to make system changes), reduce competitive advantage (through enabling greater customer portability and reducing the exclusivity with which one business can build a consumer history) and generate consumer benefit in some cases. These effects are listed dispassionately: removing friction in a customer’s choice to move is neither good nor bad of itself. It is what it is: part of the fabric of a consumer-business relationship. Change it, and other things change too.

    In my view the most pernicious bit of midata is the “mi” bit. It borrows from the language of personal data (which is itself a complex definition, but for simplicity think of name, address, data of birth etc.) and extends it to include “data about my transactions with you”. Fallacy 1 is to assume that because you have transacted with someone, you own, or have a right to, that information. Illustration: I bought a new tyre last year. My name was taken, and typed into a computer by the garage (thus creating an electronic record and avoiding a §1.10 exemption).

    Do I have the right today to ask the garage owner to delve back and release to me the precise manufacturer code for the tyre and the type of credit card I used? Wasn’t our transaction confined to the exchange of money for a tyre? If a record of other information was created, wasn’t that the record of something else: an internal accounting transaction for the purpose of retail management? This is more than a philosophical point. Certainly, the claim that “the data was related to me, so it is of me” is a weak one.

    But then there is the issue of electronic record-keeping itself. We see the argument made that because the internal transaction record exists, it is (or should be) a trivial, low-cost matter to release that in a format that is digestible by and useful to a consumer. These arguments are generally made by people who have never had to manage a development budget for IT system changes.

    Fallacy 2 is that publication is a simple matter of pressing a back office system button and generating a non-proprietary, machine-readable file. (To say nothing of the wrapping of requestor verification and security that would be needed, even for the most innocuous-seeming datasets. Where we’ve been, who’ve we’ve spoken to, what we’ve bought – all these are part of a very private mosaic).

    And we also need to be careful in our assumptions of usefulness. Utilities consumption is a very understandable use case: here, a very structured dataset which though complex in its patterns can ease the movement of customers between competing providers – matching need to product – removing the legwork otherwise required from the customer.

    Does this also apply to more sporadic retail consumption, where there might be no realistic use case, but the burden of compliance falls on the business anyway? Costs may be pushed up, and passed on, even where direct benefits are not apparent.

    And trying to draw sectoral boundaries to say that “power companies must, tyre companies don’t have to” will be an implementation nightmare. We may also see more companies anonymising their internal records through the use of a proprietary reference, rather than a name, for example, to try and duck out under §1.10. And if we try to argue that any computerised reference that can be pinned back to an individual constitutes electronic information about individual, as per §1.10, then suddenly anyone that’s paid with a credit card, anywhere, for anything (if it’s been recorded), falls into scope. Not the intention of the principles, I’d suggest.

    So with these considerations, the principles should be redrafted to clear up this implied point about a “right” to any transactional data – but instead to set out very specific data types, industry sectors (and illustrative use cases – though naturally new ones will appear with data availability) along with a compelling impact analysis that demonstrates benefits outweighing costs. This assessment should continue through the early life of enacted policy: if customer benefits outweigh the burden to businesses, then it’s working.

    But midata is far from the simple, crowd-pleasing “here’s a free thing which will save you, the consumer, money and have no external consequence” that’s featured in some of its public presentation so far.

    Know Me, Know Me Not

     

    A featureless airport departures hall.

    Behind the check-in desk, a large warrior stands, strip-lighting lending a pale lilac wash to his magnificent plumed helmet.

    Half-way along the queue is a rather dishevelled Tortoise, surrounded by heavy bags.

     

    Achilles (for he’s back again): Oi, Tortoise!

    Tortoise [po-faced and unresponsive]

    Achilles: I said, OI TORTOISE. YES. YOU. BACK THERE. TORTOISE. TORTOISE NP150417!

    Tortoise: WTF? How do you know my number? Thought that was just between me and the hatchery?

    Achilles: See this print-out of your markings? [holds up said print-out] Got this off of Google; on CheloniansOfNote.com it was. That’s you, isn’t it? Blotch, blotch, stripe, worn patch, shape that looks a bit like David Willetts’ head? Yes? Got a few other bits of info here too, to help me recognise you and the better to meet your every need.

    T: Um, so I see. But how dare you…

    A: Hang on, my horny-carapaced friend. Shuffle up to the front here. Let’s have a quiet word about this. [Tortoise makes the painfully slow journey to the head of the queue, nudging his bags one by one with his nose.] This is what you wanted, see?

    T: WHAT?

    A: You told us. You did. Well, not you individually, Tortoise NP150…

    T: STOP IT!

    A: Ok, ok. Well, collectively, our customers said things like “Hey Trojan Air, time to wake up to the new world and start treating us like people. We’re not just lumps of flesh with wallets. We want you to throw away all that stiff, corporate formality. Get to know us. Empower yourselves. Adapt. Use a bit of bloody initiative. See us for who we are.” So we have.

    T: Yeah, but you can’t just go gathering information like that about me, without my permission. It’s like me shell’s been invaded. Horrible. Oi moi!

    A: Don’t go getting classical on me: these characterisations are only pixel-deep. Now, look over there, now, at the SleazyJet desk. See that queue? Hundreds of them. Hot and knackered, they are. And going nowhere for a couple of hours yet. Now, I know, and the SleazyStaff know, that there’s a nice little waiting room round the back. With just one very comfy seat in it. And air-con. They can’t tell everyone, it’d get rammed. But see that woman just there? With the huge bump? Could drop any minute. You think it’s ok for the staff to, you know, use their bloody EYES to spot her, and offer her that seat? Or are you going to go all “no, no, they must know nothing, they must treat us all-equal-and-anonymous like”?

    T: Well, I suppose that’s a bit different.

    A: So it’s ok to use my bloody EYES to infer stuff about my customers, so’s I can make their service better, but it has to stop when I use, what? A computer? A phone? A database?

    T: Now you come to mention it…

    A: Because isn’t that where mechanical process (oh so twentieth century) stops, and service begins? When we start inferring? When we use one of the very few gifts that mankind seems to be blessed with – pattern recognition – to judge that if someone is cross-legged and hopping from foot to foot, it might be politic to proactively remind them where the loo is? To check on our systems so that their seventeen letters of complaint that they keep getting woken for meals when they’d rather sleep haven’t been an utter waste of time? To infer, beyond this, that similar awakenings for important matters of Shop-In-The-Sky sales might also receive an unfavourable response even though they haven’t actually WRITTEN TO US ABOUT THIS NOR GIVEN US EXPLICIT PERMISSION TO EVEN GUESS IT MIGHT MATTER TO THEM?

    T: Steady on, old boy.

    A: Sorry. Emotive stuff, this. Which is why this post is written as a dialogue – less confrontational that way. Where were we? Oh yes – look over there! PoshAir have got one of their regulars arriving. He’s a FTSE-100 Chairman, he is. Yeah, I know. Miserable and anonymous, grey and crumpled, to you and me. But to him? The Grand Kahoona. The Large Cheese. He wants to be recognised. And look again: by the sort of chance that only occurs in allegorical blog posts, he happens to be featured on the cover of this month’s Kahoona magazine over there on that newsstand. Now, shall we ask their staff to shield their eyes so that there is no prospect of them contaminating their green-field minds with this inarguably public-domain factuality of who the fuck he is?

    T: Yeah, but it’s invasive. He might not want to be recognised.

    A: Isn’t that a matter for their judgement? They are, remember, humans. Providing a service. Let’s at least hope they have some basic lightness of touch. They do not have to march up and shout “Mr Cheese great to have you back it has been 34 days and 2 hours since you flew with us shame about the collapse of the zinc deal in Bolivia your usual gin and valium then?” A mere “Mr Cheese, good to see you again. Let us know if you need anything” isn’t invasive. Invasive is ferreting through information that’s not public. Invasive is phoning people up or emailing them out of the blue, forcibly taking their time away. This stuff here is just observation, inference and discretion.

    T: Ah, but it’s where it could all lead, innit. That dossier on me that you’ve got behind the desk…

    A: Dossier? Ooooh how very Le Carré! You got that out of that article, didn’t you? One of many using lurid language to play on everyone’s fears about “where it could all lead”.

    T: Call it what you will. You are reprocessing data and creating databases and riding a chariot and horses through the provisions of the Data Protection Act (1998). And you know it.

    A: I am, and that’s a very fair challenge. I am struggling to justify it – hey, hang on, pass me your phone for a minute.

    T: No bloody chance. You know enough about me already.

    A: I just wanted a quick peep at your contacts book.

    T: That’s none of your business.

    A: And yet you download all these apps to your phone and give them permission to access what must be hundreds, maybe even more, personal records and upload them to Morin Towers and gods knows where else, and remind me at what point did you register yourself with the Information Commissioner let alone do any of that “seeking consent” hoo-ha?

    T: Yeah, well, that’s for organisations. I’m just Tortoise.

    A: Tortoise With A Talent, Ltd, according to my, erm, “dossier”. You still think the boundary between individual and organisation is that clear, and in any case serves as any sort of robust moral framework for this sort of issue about data responsibility? You still content that the DPA (1998) is in any way fit for purpose for the world we now live in? A world of massive volunteered personal information? A world where even if you don’t put your own pics up somebody is going to tag your face and you will be able to do jack all about it and will just have to get over this unassailable fact?

    T: I suppose. That’s all going to need clearing up when they refresh the Data Protection Act, innit?

    A: Just. A. Bit. But in one final attempt to justify my creepy snooping, can I at least appeal to your libertarian side? It’s one thing to berate the state for acting like this, for gathering information and building megadatabases about individuals. Its civic hygiene may one day become suspect, its motivation potentially questionable, and it’s pretty hard to avoid. But this is a freaking airline. You don’t like what we do, if you think we’re creepy, then you’ll stop using us, and we’ll change the way we work to get you back again. Less of this Big Brother Watch angst; save that for those who really deserve it. Frankly Tortoise, there’s some cognitive dissonance going on here. I know (coz it says so in your dossier) that you hate all this state intervention stuff. You really want businesses to be able to do a good job with the very lightest hand of regulation ‘pon them. Now you’re making no sense with all this paranoid guff.

    T: Ok, ok. The jig’s up. I guess what’s really going on is that a general, non-specific feeling of impending doom about personal data in the cloud (and in our hands/claws) is creating a toxic environment where any story that even touches on search, or social networks, or biometrics leads us to throw all common sense out of the window. I guess.

    A&T: Oi moi! Ta’las! Tlê’môn!

    Seeing red

    A bold tweet’s been getting a bit of an airing this morning:

    Shall we have a closer look at that one?

    Firstly, I have some doubts about the practicality of actually getting the smoking-tyre photos needed to make this work. I presume the idea isn’t for fast-lensed SLR owners like me to camp out at the lights for a day, ready to get crisp face pics of the transgressors? Good luck using your BlackBerry camera for that.

    And I presume it is faces that’s being sought here. I mean, otherwise you’d just be building a Tumblr of blurry lycra-clad arses. Which might be of some “specialist” interest–but not actually a whole lot of use.

    Which means you need to be ready in waiting on the outgoing side of the junction. Having predicted that matey with the headphones and fixie is intent on diving over the red. OK…bear with me here.

    So what use will all those faces be, then? For outraged anti-cyclist types to roar at the screen: “Naughty, naughty man! Is the advanced stop line not enough for you, you bounder?”

    Or perhaps for some sort of vigilante action, especially in smaller towns where you might just see the same cyclist ever again? Stand by with your spoke-sticks, defenders of the peace.

    Or for, oh wait–here we go, some kind of enforcement by the Authorities. Now that either means we get serious about facial recognition…or…we treat cyclists more like car drivers, and bring in a compulsory licensing-and-visible-identity-number scheme. Neither of which will be expensive, problematic or intrusive at all.

    Hang on. What flavour of libertarian is this then?

    One that prefers heavy-handed state surveillance and intervention over the free choice of the individual to exercise a decision (which will sometimes be flawed, but hey, that’s free choice) over the extent of their compliance with a system designed for much more dangerous vehicles capable of driving at far greater speeds?

    Really?

    I mean there couldn’t be another reason that someone would come up with a proposal to have a go at cyclists like this?

    There must be one. I just can’t quite put my finger on it. No, it’s gone again. Damn. Nearly had it there.

    Publishers and publishing

    There’s these three middle managers on a train…

    No, it’s not a joke. Not really. About 1pm today, these three geezers are on my train, on their way to a management meeting. The figures and charts strewn over the table don’t look that healthy. There’s an edge to their conversation–three pints of banter with insecurity chasers.

    The nature of their business is very obvious: local newspapers. Well, that explains a few things straightaway.

    The operating costs of the business are on their minds. And on their lips. One of them (let’s call him Mr Porky, for no other reason than he was an enormous, dishevelled, sweaty bloater of a human being) has the print-out of staff and salaries.

    “Look here”, Porky says to his compadres, stabbing the paper with a greasy chipolata, “Charlie Cheese is on 32K and he’s only an associate reporter”.

    “Gaw, associate reporter, terrible terrible that is,” comes the intoned response.

    “And Fred Snapper, Chief Photographer. 30k!”

    “30k?! Daylight bleeding robbery that is.”

    “Strewth, Steve Hack, 43k–and what is ‘e? What is ‘e? Senior sub. SENIOR SUB.” Mr P is positively frothing now.

    “Length of service, innit. Heh heh heh.”

    They all fall about laughing.

    I don’t.

    The names aren’t real, but the line of conversation is. It went on for twenty minutes. A great long list of real names and salaries. A name would be volunteered by one of them and Mr Porky would look him up and read out his salary–generally to another burst of piss-taking.

    Of course, being online I could fill in a lot of the blanks as I sat there. Who these three worked for. Which papers their group published. Contact details for the named-and-mocked reporters.

    And?

    And that’s the hard bit. Regular readers will know I dabble here in matters of the public and private–on the new conventions evolving almost daily about what we mean by “publishing” and “public space”. About harm, impact and intent. About role, and judging.

    A while back I wrote about a train guard on the very same route. And that time I went ahead and published what he said (with some thoughts on the issues raised).

    This time I won’t. After some hard thinking, I won’t name their company in this post, or call them out on any of the specific things they said.

    Why not? It’s a judgement call, really. Was harm actually done? I was probably the only person listening who took any note at all of what was said. Does the fact that I was online and have a bit of a thing about matters of privacy and disclosure justify a public escalation?

    A private note to the company about the wisdom of behaving like this–yes, I’ll do that [I’ve done that now]. That seems proportionate. But to drag an issue of privacy violation even further into the public gaze? Isn’t that just salacious? Whose needs are being met? (to use one of my favourite phrases).

    And who am I to judge here? What have we become when we spy on each other for harm-free transgressions? Or perhaps worse, for potential transgressions. To bring down some sort of corporate, judicial or regulatory hammer on them for something they did that could have led to a bad thing? Who gave me the horsehair wig and breeches?

    They were gits, for sure. But would I be joining them by being Mr Smartypantsblogger and parroting everything back for the world to see?

    I’m not quite sure why they don’t deserve the full transcription (and even photo?) treatment. I just don’t think they do.

    There may not be a “public” and “private” in any sense that might have been recognised fifty years ago.

    But there is still discretion.

    Customer First? Yeah, right.

    I see, via the excellent Robert Brook mail-out (do please subscribe), that there’s another site out there trying to cut the biggest Gordian knot of all in the field of customer services. Of course customers want cheapness. Of course customers want quality. But the two are in tension against each other.

    Unlike the cruder saynoto0870 about which I’ve written before, Get Human attempts a subtler combination of crowd-sourced wisdom not only on what channels prove to be the best for getting through to Customer Services, but also offering handy hints on how to navigate them more easily once you’re connected.

    Sample: “dial 08xx… and keep pressing 0, ignoring all prompts, until you get to an operator.” Well, indeed. And it’s hardly a new discovery that banging away on the zero or the hash button can get you that elusive human voice.

    But it’s still a hack. It’s still “defecting” in the vernacular of game theory – trying to find a way around the system rather than devising something that actually works, and doing it in a way that doesn’t involve subterfuge.

    What’s missing – what’s always been missing – for me in all of this Customer First rhetoric is any real appreciation of why things are the way they are. It’s not all perverse behaviour on the part of organisations. Nor is it all blatant cost-cutting or profit-grabbing. It’s a trade-off.

    “We put the customer first” is one of the most weaselly phrases imaginable, whether in public or private sector. It’s probably Shareholder (or Taxpayer) First, in reality. And is that so very wrong? What’s much worse is the masking of true intent behind these bizarre slogans.

    The system may be optimised for a lower price. It may be optimised for speedy and free-flowing service. But it won’t be optimised for both.

    When you have to indulge in odd behaviour in an attempt to change this optimisation (like that banging away at the 0 key) you know there’s some reality masking going on.

    Here’s a little case study to make the point: Ever hired a car abroad? You go through a ton of online data entry to ensure your personal and driver details, and payment, are handed over as requested. In advance. All you have to do when you get to the airport desk is establish your identity and take your key – everything else has been done? Right?

    Wrong.

    Spend a few minutes listening to what’s going on in a queue like this. It’s fascinating. No transaction takes less than five minutes – many take at least ten. The queue always builds quickly. Always.

    And what is going on? Well, transactions are being optimised for revenue, not speed.

    Take the additional paper-filling that appears at this stage. It might be a “local police form”, or an additional statement of insurance liability. There’s absolutely nothing on these forms that hasn’t been already provided online (or could have been).

    But the act of filling it in starts to work in other ways on the hapless victim. It’s a foreign country. See? Foreign form in front of you. Thoughts fly fast: they drive badly here – or do they? Shit. Best check. And what about the police? Mirrored shades, being pulled over on a dusty road, accused of goodness knows what. Gold teeth. Lip-smacking. Cash fines. Smelly cells. The images are set in train.

    The swift passage from carousel to exit gate has been interrupted, and certainly not for your benefit.

    And then the killer words come across the desk. A script that never fails to elicit a visceral response. “You agree you have taken the minimum insurance cover permissable. The excess will be a thousand euros. But you can wipe this out with a simple payment of just twenty a day…” And inevitably, beads of sweat now falling down, a judgement has to be made. Invariably on the side of cautiousness. The picture has been painted.

    You had all this information back in your office a week ago. You made a rational judgement of the likelihood of you stacking the car, and made your choice. But now? Now it looks different. And the tapping and shuffling in the queue behind means you have to make a decision. Now. Tick. Tick. Tick.

    Oh, and a good bit of time is often spent with customer saying “but I thought I’d already done all this…” Tick. Tick. Tick.

    So. That’s what optimised for revenue looks like. Not customer comfort.

    Let’s be honest, though. This is all fine. It is what it is: business.

    The increase in revenue keeps the hire business afloat. Keeps it competitive in other ways. Allows for headline hire rates to be very low. Gets customers to the desk in the first place. And round it goes… Etc. etc. etc. Hardly the stuff of a management science PhD.

    You just have to hack the bullshit process like this. For yourself. Every time.

    Yawn.

    My plea? Please just give me a signpost at the top of, well, any transaction really: “Give me convenience, or give me cheap.” At least let me decide what’s optimised.

    Keep that separation right the way along the line: forms, queues, phone lines. Really. Because one day we’ll grow up about the psychology of customer service and wonder why we ever fell for games like this. Ever.

    (I hope.)

    ——-

    Postscript: Stefan C has pointed me in the direction of this neat little service, allowing you to buy your own excess reduction insurance. Nicely disruptive. More of these, please.

    The problem with the TaxPayers’ Alliance

    Or let me be more specific: my problem with the TPA. (Also applies to the Tea Parties of this world, and other proponents of what we might term small-state, individual-freedom libertarianism.)

    It’s this.

    At the very highest level of political/economic reasoning, it’s not that barking, really.

    They believe the state should be small. That it should only do what a collectively-organised, representative and publicly-funded state should absolutely have to do. That it should be held to account, and kept out of the way as far as possible of a healthy, free-functioning market. Even when that market may do somewhat unwholesome things. The freedom to choose our degree of wholesomeness is critical.

    It’s a reasonable argument. I happen to think it’s flawed in any form of implementation, but so are lots of other ideologies. Doesn’t mean you can’t argue downwards from the concept, provided you keep an honest anchor in your base principles.

    No, my problem with the TPA is the way they go about this arguing.

    It’s difficult to engage public sentiment about nebulous concepts like the -cracies. And it’s really hard to have a meaningful debate about the problems found in large, complex systems.

    So instead they focus on scare stories – on shameful, but usually rare, negative outcomes. On “non-jobs”, bad technology, poor management. Invariably in the public sector.

    They will rush to find and publicise “the thing that sounds so awful that you could hardly believe it to be true”. Often because it isn’t true. Or is stretched and exaggerated beyond all recognition. As a technique, it is lazy beyond belief; calculating, demeaning and wholly dishonest.

    The TPA’s true talent lies in finding themes that will grab a mass public imagination, and then plague it.

    The complicated reality of organisations? What you really have to do to administer any enterprise involving hundreds of thousands, or millions, of people-based transactions (whatever sector you’re in!) – management challenges as old as organisations themselves?

    No, way too challenging for them.

    Arguments about the misuse of public money are made using attempted parallels with the world of the household, with the micro-business, with the near-to-home. An iPad? It’s an entertainment system. It should never be bought with public money! Happiness surveys? Pah – no need for them round kitchen tables in the real world – just talk to each other. Or better still, just lump it. (Seriously, I could use a thousand more words finding egregious examples of this style. But you have Google.)

    There are some rare examples of good work – particularly around issues of privacy and the implications of new technologies for the relationship between citizen and state. That’s what I find so baffling – these attempts to engage on strong points of principle are utterly undermined by this succession of cheap jibes tailored for the smaller-format newspapers.

    (What they don’t focus on very much, ironically, is tax paying. But that’s a side point for this post.)

    And if you still find temptation in your path – if you hear that little voice of the Daily Mail leader-writer in your ear (he visits us all, in dark times) whispering “just cut X or Y, or crack down hard on Z, you KNOW it makes sense,” bear this in mind:

    Most shades of political thought have been tried. Human ingenuity and systemic inertia generally mean that things mooch on pretty much as they always have been, despite the rocks that various “leaders” might try to lob in from time to time. So if you’re wavering between left and right, and seeing points of recognition in both camps (and you should – to do otherwise would be a worrying sign of lazy thinking), how about putting your shoulder behind the one that doesn’t, every time and very rapidly, lead to policies which are about being vile to people?

    Is that simple enough?

    Nice one, Trevor Downing

    Fate, and the vermin who buy and sell marketing lists, have a strange way of mocking. When money’s never been tighter, my name and address seem to have been tagged with the hilariously inaccurate description: “high net worth, definitely a target for personal wealth management services”.

    And as a result, what deep joy the postman brought me recently!

    Imagine my delight, Trevor Downing–yes, you Trevor Downing, of the Trevor Downing Wealth Management Practice, Market Square, Westerham TN16 1BR–when the following little cartoon dropped out of the envelope.

    You might, possibly, have sent that to the wrong person, Trev.

    I know there are retired Colonels up and down the South East who’ll be clutching their highly-decorated boners under their dressing gowns at the sight of such anti-tax grot–their gnarled old hands frantically squeezing a last drop of life from the old soldier, spurred on by the prospect of keeping the Chancellor’s filthy mitts off what’s left of their Service pension.

    But.

    It might strike you, as it did me, that there’s something pretty horrible about marketing your services like this.

    Or like this.

    Look at her, up there on her nice white fluffy cloud. Nice, white-haired, white Mrs Hayward. Managed to “structure” things so that she won the game: maximum kudos for exiting with that marvellous sign-off “TAX PAID ZERO”. How those heavenly trumpets must have welcomed her!

    I know. Of course I do. It’s all perfectly legal; it’s just making sure the right amount is paid… yeah yeah yeah. But it’s not about that, is it? It’s about an attitude. The attitude that says it’s absolutely fine to fuck around and fiddle with every last shareholding–to make the cat a director of your non-existent-trading-entity if it makes the most of some allowance somewhere. I do know someone rich who puts their pet dogs down on their tax return as “guard dogs”, for fuck’s sake. Really.

    That attitude. The one that crows merrily about how having 500k liquid is an inherited (often literally) right, and there’s no bloody way that any of that is going on stuff for the poor. Coz they’ll only waste it.

    The attitude that scours a workforce of tens of millions of public sector workers to find the handful of egregious examples that they can then spatter over the papers to make Mrs Hayward and Colonel Cunt (Retd) feel that much more justified about their little visit to see Mr Downing.

    And this:

    Yeah. They won too. More entitled white arseholes sitting on some massive fucking white golf club sofa in the sky. Well done. Big whoop.

    Ah, Mr Sensible. Mr Selfish Shithead Sodding Sensible. You didn’t need that NHS ambulance when you tripped on your cliff-top walk with the Crown Green Bowlers, now did you? Nah, that stuff happens to other people, doesn’t it? You don’t need streetlights. Not where you live. Nor state education, nor environmental health protection (Mr S eats in nice places). Mental health services (are you crazy)? Income support? Disability benefit? Winter fuel? No. NO. NO!

    That’s all for other people, isn’t it? Trevor’ll help you keep it that way, too.

    You just carry on clinging on to your selfish, misanthropic, lazy sack of comforting lies: the state’s a thief, “public”=”wasted”, the less you contribute the more you win, and anyone less fortunate than you can just crawl away and die.

    Nice one, Trevor. Nice one, son.

    Fare dealing

    Remind me again: what’s the purpose of opening up all this public data?

    Ah yes, that’s it. To create value. And you can’t get a much stronger example of real value in the real world than showing people how to save money when buying train tickets.

    Fare pricing is a fairly hit-and-miss business, as you’ve probably noticed. We don’t have a straight relationship between distance and price. Far from it.

    The many permutations of route, operator and ticket type throw up some strange results. We hear of first class tickets being cheaper than standard, returns cheaper than singles, and you can definitely get a lower overall price by buying your journey in parts, provided that the train stops at the place where the tickets join.

    The rules here are a bit weird: although station staff have an obligation to quote the cheapest overall price for a particular route, they aren’t allowed to advertise “split-fare” deals, even where they know they exist. Huh?

    Why this distinctly paternalistic approach? Well, say the operators: if a connection runs late, your second ticket might not be eligible, and there might be little details of the terms and conditions of component tickets that trip you up, and, and, and…well, it’s all just too complicated for you. Better you get a coherent through-price (and we pocket the higher fare, hem hem).

    There’s no denying it is complicated. Precisely how to find the “split-fare” deal you need is a tiresome, labour-intensive process of examining every route, terms and price combination, and stitching together some sense out of it all. And, indeed, in taking on a bit of risk if some of those connections don’t run to time.

    You might be lucky, and have an assistant who will hack through fares tables and separate websites to do you that for you. But you’d be really be wasting their time (and your money).

    Because that sort of task is exactly what technology is good at.

    Taking vast arrays of semi-structured data and finding coherent answers. Quickly. And if there’s some risk involved, making that clear. We’re grown-ups. We can cope.

    There’s no doubt at all that the raw materials–the fares for individual journey segments–are public information. Nobody would ever want, or try, to hide a fare for a specific route.

    So when my esteemed colleague Jonathan Raper–doyen of opening up travel-related information and making it useful–in his work at Placr and elsewhere, put his mind to the question of how new services could crunch up the underlying data to drive out better deals for passengers, I don’t doubt that some operators started to get very nervous indeed.

    Jonathan got wind–after the November 2011 meeting of the Transport Sector Transparency Board–that a most intriguing piece of advice had been given by the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC) to the Department for Transport on the “impact of fare-splitting on rail ticket revenues”.

    Well, you’d sort of expect an association which represents the interests of train operators to have a view on something that might be highly disruptive to their business models, wouldn’t you?

    So what was that advice? He put in a Freedom of Information request to find out.

    And has just had it refused, on grounds of commercial confidentiality.

    This is pretty shocking–and will certainly be challenged, with good reason.

    Perhaps more than most, I have some sympathy with issues of commercial reality in relation to operational data. We set up forms of “competition” between providers for contracts, and in order to make that real, it’s inevitable that some details–perhaps relating to detailed breakdowns of internal costs, or technical logistics data–might make a difference to subsequent market interest (and pricing strategy) were they all to be laid out on the table. I really do understand that.

    But a fare is a fare. It’s a very public fact. It’s not hidden in any way. So what could ATOC have said to DfT that is so sensitive?

    The excuse given by DfT that this advice itself is the sort of commercial detail that would prejudice future openness is, frankly, nonsense.

    I look forward to the unmasking of this advice. And in due course to the freeing-up of detailed fares data.

    And then to people like Jonathan and Money Saving Expert creating smart new business models that allow us to use information like it’s supposed to be used: to empower service users, to increase choice, and to deliver real, pound-notes value into the hands of real people.

    That’s why we’re doing all this open data stuff, remember?