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- Kable, Thursday 30 July 2009 00.05 BST
A strong, long lived government will tend to seize on an insight then overuse it to destruction. For the Thatcher-Major government, one was privatisation. For the Blair-Brown government, an equivalent has been the use of computerised profiling, in the manner of customer relationship management systems (CRM) used by retailers. Shadow immigration minister Damian Green, in his recent speech 'A Free Country?', has challenged its use within government, and particularly in policing.
CRM has helped retailers such as Tesco through gaining large amounts of information on their customers, allowing them to anticipate what they want and also modify their behaviour through personally targeted marketing. This means profiling customers, but millions are happy to submit to it – schemes such as Clubcard are voluntary and provide benefits to members.
Gathering data for CRM systems to analyse is fairly easy in shops: tills do most of the work, and customers can be bribed into carrying shopper identity cards. The concept gets more problematic when applied to public services, firstly because while the retail customer is always right, public services often involve telling people they are wrong. For example, the English NHS offended some parents by telling them their children were at risk of cancer because they were just over a notional target weight for their age.
CRM style profiling relies on calculations based on partial information – fine in deciding which supermarket vouchers someone receives, far more problematic if there are serious consequences. In short, it isn't fair. As Green pointed out in his speech: "Google or the Nectar card companies may know lots about you, but at least they can't arrest you on the basis of what you have told them."
Green asserted that the use of such mass information gathering and profiling is creating "a policing led state", based on the assumption "that the most effective way to tackle terrorism is to make all of us suspects. Information on everyone in this country needs to be collected, stored and shared because a few people are planning evil acts".
Such as assumption is the justification for many government IT systems, including e-Borders, which will store extensive data on everyone's journeys abroad, and the police's increasing use of automatic numberplate recognition camera systems, which store and analyse data on all vehicles passing their cameras.
The security services and police have argued that letting them trawl everyone's data is a price worth paying if it can prevent terrorist attacks. There are, however, numerous problems with this argument.
As Green pointed out, mass profiling separates the law abiding majority from the security services, creating an 'Us and Them' relationship.
He made a moral case, but there are also strong pragmatic arguments which are likely to exacerbate the erosion of trust. Firstly, profiling makes mistakes, and this matters when it has consequences beyond what kind of supermarket voucher is issued. It is not uncommon for people to be held up at an airport because they are wrongly on a watchlist or stopped after passing an ANPR camera because a central database has failed to update their insurance status.
Secondly, such technology is expensive, and in a era of budget restraint implementing it may mean cuts elsewhere. Thirdly, these techniques are not – and cannot be, in a democracy – secret, allowing the determined to avoid some or all of their capabilities. It is not difficult to spot ANPR cameras and then try to avoid them, or take a train to Paris then travel to a terrorist training camp from there, keeping the ultimate destination off e-Borders.
Green criticised "shared services" in his speech, when he probably meant data sharing. It is a mistake of terminology which does not invalidate his challenge to a central assumption of government computing policy, that the success of CRM and profiling in retailing could be transferred to the public sector. It remains one of the government's greatest failings in IT that after 12 years, it has been unable to spot the differences between Tesco plc and Her Majesty's Government.
SA Mathieson is digital content editor of Kable
