Volunteering for surveillance?

What do you suppose the reaction would be if your government (wherever you live) asked you to volunteer to carry a tagging device that would record where you are, every few minutes of the day? Even if they would need a warrant to access the information? But you can relax (for a moment) - I haven't heard of any government coming up with that one.

Happy now? But not for long... Because the chances are that you have already joined this 'programme'. Do you have a mobile phone? And do you keep it switched on?

There has been a lot written and said about the amount of personal data that various sites ask for, and that a lot of people hand over without any (or very few) qualms. There have been stories in the news about people losing jobs (or not getting them) because of their blogs, social networking sites, and web presence.

As a Data Management professional, should I care? Should it affect how I do my job?

Yes and no.

Yes, I should still resist the desires of the organisations I work for to store as much data as they can get about people 'because it might come in handy one day'. If we don't have a use for it now, then we should not keep it. But what if we can see a use in the short term? Say, in the next 12 months? Should we collect it now? While it is tempting, I believe that we should not. I have worked on too many 'programmes' where phase 2 never happened, and if we had added data for the use of phase 2, we would have ended up storing data that we didn't (officially) need. And people do have a tendency to want to use (analyse, run reports on) as much data as they can get that might be relevant to them. (If they really need it, then collect it when they have provided a business case and funding and cleared it with the Data Protection/Governance people.)

No, we should not collect data just because 'everyone does'. Nor should we supply it because someone asks for it - my Facebook profile shows my name, birthday, sixth form college and university attended (so people can find me), and gender. It does not show my relations who are also on Facebook, relationship status, sexual orientation, contact details, or anything else that is known to my friends but no-one else's business. Just because they ask, they don't automatically get! And if anyone demands things I would rather not provide (by making them mandatory fields), I have four options:

1. Lie
2. Decline to join (and, ideally, tell them why)
3. Give the information (but remember to ask them why they want it, where (geographically) they will hold it, and what they intend to do with it).
4. Provide it and assume that 'they' know what they are doing and will not abuse my trust.

Option 1 serves them right. Option 2 hits them where they care (losing business, members, subscribers, whatever), especially if enough people tell them they have lost. Option 3 is the slippery slope - unless someone really needs to know my dog's favourite food (or whatever) in order to provide a service to me, they have no business making my provision of that information a pre-requisite for the supply of the service. Option 4 is the worst option (but also, I think, the one most commonly adopted).

As a Data Management professional, I believe that I have a duty to fight for all non-essential fields being optional. (And making the mailing list a more attractive sales proposition does not count as essential.)

So, fellow data professionals (and anyone else who stumbled on this blog): thank you for reading this far, and will you join me on the virtual barricades that are fast crumbling under the onslaught of ill-thought-out data collection policies?

Next time someone tries to get you to tell them something they don't strictly need to know, go for option 1 or 2. And tell them why!

If you are involved in specifying data to be collected, make as much as possible optional (or leave it out altogether (you can also argue that storage may be cheap, but it will never be free!)

And never forget that data about you is yours.

Geek pride?

I am job hunting at the moment, and I just got asked what I do in between jobs. And so I explained - I maintain the DAMA-I website, I do DAMA UK committee things, I write presentations about data management for conferences... And then I paid attention to what I was saying, and started talking about photography and archaology (which are the things I like doing and reading about when I have to move away from a keyboard).

I didn't mention that I take photographs to use in presentations, nor that I have been toying with the idea of writing something about the history of data storage (which goes back about 5000 years to the clay tablets that the Babylonians used to record grain and beer going into and out of their warehouses.) One thing that data geeks learn early on is that many things are connected (or can be, with a little thought). Another is that most people don't really care all that much!

But next time you go into a bookshop, pick up a newspaper, or read a web page, spare a thought for the first person who worked out how to record that 3 bushels of grain were delivered, and 1 bushel taken out, and by whom. Because those pictures on clay tablets gradually developed into writing - and that might just make data management a much older discipline than we currently think it is?