The Times: Tech column - ID card non-consultation/e-lancers
By David Rowan
Now here's a strange thing. This e-obsessed Government - which wants us to vote electronically and file our taxes online - has decided that internet users' opinions are actually worth 0.02 per cent of those of "ordinary" voters. We know this because, in its public consultation on identity cards, now closed, the Home Office has decided to count more than 5,000 mostly critical e-mailed responses as a single "No" vote.
Last October, the Government announced that two thirds of responses then received under the six-month consultation were in favour of ID cards. This prompted Stand, the non-partisan campaign group behind FaxYourMP.com, to create a web page explaining why it thought the cards were a dangerous idea, and offering to pass on people's thoughts to the Home Office. By the end of January this year, when the consultation ended, 5,029 people had responded. A fellow campaign group, Privacy International, even let people phone in their comments and forwarded the audio files.
Then on April 28, Beverley Hughes, the Minister for Citizenship and Immigration, told Parliament that the "2,000 responses" received during the consultation had been "about two to one in favour of introducing a scheme". The activists at Stand learnt subsequently that every one of its users' views - including those supporting the card - had been rolled into a single vote against it. Danny O'Brien, one of Stand's founders, has just sent Hughes a letter seeking an explanation. "I feel that there were a lot of people involved in the ID card consultation for whom this would be their first experience of contributing directly to a government initiative," he writes.
"To turn to them now and explain that their voice counts for nothing - or 1/5,000th of a voice, whichever is greater - seems to me to convey the exact opposite of what a consultation is meant to achieve."
It is not for this column to enter the political debate over ID cards - the Government evidently has its own fixed view of their value, consultations notwithstanding. All we can do is to point out some of the serious technological questions that have been raised about them. That the enormous national database of personal data required would be a prime target for organised criminals or corrupt insiders, leading to fraud and identity theft. That such a database would inevitably be used by officials for unforeseen purposes, perhaps cross-matched with other databases - your library loans and car movements - to make it easier to monitor you.
Besides, do you really trust the Government to run such a huge IT project, considering its record in this area to date?
++++
THERE goes the e-lance marketplace. Five years ago, Thomas Malone and Robert Laubacher published an influential Harvard Business Review article called "The dawn of the e-lance economy" that inspired a new industry in which freelance workers would bid for corporate work. The article predicted that "large, permanent corporations" would soon be replaced by "flexible, temporary networks of individuals" who would sell their services electronically in a highly efficient global marketplace.
As with many of 1998's internet predictions, things haven't quite worked out as planned. One of the biggest such networks, Guru.com, has just e-mailed its freelancers to say that it "will no longer be matching talent with employers effective June 30".
Other sites such as ants.com have already gone, and the balance on survivors such as Emoonlighter.com (317,000 freelancers, just 30,000 potential clients) suggests that the outsourcing revolution has stalled. Personal contacts, old boy, are still what count.
(The Times, June 3 2003)
Now here's a strange thing. This e-obsessed Government - which wants us to vote electronically and file our taxes online - has decided that internet users' opinions are actually worth 0.02 per cent of those of "ordinary" voters. We know this because, in its public consultation on identity cards, now closed, the Home Office has decided to count more than 5,000 mostly critical e-mailed responses as a single "No" vote.
Last October, the Government announced that two thirds of responses then received under the six-month consultation were in favour of ID cards. This prompted Stand, the non-partisan campaign group behind FaxYourMP.com, to create a web page explaining why it thought the cards were a dangerous idea, and offering to pass on people's thoughts to the Home Office. By the end of January this year, when the consultation ended, 5,029 people had responded. A fellow campaign group, Privacy International, even let people phone in their comments and forwarded the audio files.
Then on April 28, Beverley Hughes, the Minister for Citizenship and Immigration, told Parliament that the "2,000 responses" received during the consultation had been "about two to one in favour of introducing a scheme". The activists at Stand learnt subsequently that every one of its users' views - including those supporting the card - had been rolled into a single vote against it. Danny O'Brien, one of Stand's founders, has just sent Hughes a letter seeking an explanation. "I feel that there were a lot of people involved in the ID card consultation for whom this would be their first experience of contributing directly to a government initiative," he writes.
"To turn to them now and explain that their voice counts for nothing - or 1/5,000th of a voice, whichever is greater - seems to me to convey the exact opposite of what a consultation is meant to achieve."
It is not for this column to enter the political debate over ID cards - the Government evidently has its own fixed view of their value, consultations notwithstanding. All we can do is to point out some of the serious technological questions that have been raised about them. That the enormous national database of personal data required would be a prime target for organised criminals or corrupt insiders, leading to fraud and identity theft. That such a database would inevitably be used by officials for unforeseen purposes, perhaps cross-matched with other databases - your library loans and car movements - to make it easier to monitor you.
Besides, do you really trust the Government to run such a huge IT project, considering its record in this area to date?
++++
THERE goes the e-lance marketplace. Five years ago, Thomas Malone and Robert Laubacher published an influential Harvard Business Review article called "The dawn of the e-lance economy" that inspired a new industry in which freelance workers would bid for corporate work. The article predicted that "large, permanent corporations" would soon be replaced by "flexible, temporary networks of individuals" who would sell their services electronically in a highly efficient global marketplace.
As with many of 1998's internet predictions, things haven't quite worked out as planned. One of the biggest such networks, Guru.com, has just e-mailed its freelancers to say that it "will no longer be matching talent with employers effective June 30".
Other sites such as ants.com have already gone, and the balance on survivors such as Emoonlighter.com (317,000 freelancers, just 30,000 potential clients) suggests that the outsourcing revolution has stalled. Personal contacts, old boy, are still what count.
(The Times, June 3 2003)
posted by David Rowan at Tuesday, June 03, 2003
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