Anne Clwyd’s report looking at how patients’ complaints within the UK’s NHS are dealt with has just been published. The headline used by the Daily Telegraph’s for its coverage of the report caught my eye: Give hospital patients pen and paper to report bad care, report says The report argues that complaints are an “early warning system” within health care systems, and that it needs to be easier for... »
Fascinating debate in the online version of the Guardian on Saturday (2013-10-12) under the title “Spooks and secrets: what is the public’s right to know?”. In it, Shami Chakrabarti, the Director of the British civil liberties advocacy organisation Liberty, and ex-MI6 officer Nigel Inkster debated the rights and wrongs of exposing the activities of the UK and US security and intelligence ser... »
The issue of privacy, or more generally and accurately the issue of who owns what data, and the rights and obligations associated with the use of that data have clearly shot up the public agenda. A term that a few years ago would have been associated with what you could and couldn’t do or say in your own home is now the topic of daily discussion in the context of Google, Facebook, the NSA and GCHQ... »
The murmur of debate and discussion concerning the proper use, and increasing abuse, of their citizens’ personal data by governments has risen to a crescendo since the first of Edward Snowden’s revelations about the US’s NSA PRISM and the UK’s GCHQ Tempora programmes were publicied by the Guardian in June 2013. Alongside that there has been a steady stream of continued exposure of the way in which... »
In a previous post I argued that trust was a central and massively important part of what is involved in being human, and social, and living a good life. And I’m aware that that sounds terribly soft and earnest and, in these cynical times, hopelessly naïve. So I’ve been looking at what economists, often a pretty hard-nosed and unromantic lot, have to say about trust. It turns out that what they ha... »
Although it seems like it’s been around forever and life would be unimaginable without it, the Internet is young. From the first inkling of the idea (possibly in 1962, when J.C.R. Licklider of MIT in August 1962 wrote a series of memos outlining a “Galactic Network”) and its commercial and general public “birth” about 20 years ago, its growth and impact since then has been massive. An... »
Since Edward Snowdon, the US whistle-blower, first leaked details of the NSA’s PRISM and related programs on June 7th, two clear themes have emerged within the ensuing debate. The first is the notion of exchange and the need for this exchange to be equitable. President Obama and others have sought to justify the PRISM program in terms of the exchange of privacy in return for (increased) security,... »
