Tim Berners Lee, Chris Huhne, Press Freedom, Public Interest and Privacy Lessons

Yesterday a UK Was-Once-Important Politico got found guilty for speeding, and transferring the penalty points to his wife (illegal, but lots of couples do it) to avoid a driving ban. Anyway, after he did the original speed deed, there was then a rather textbook affair/acrimonious divorce/etc etc, and the points swopping somehow ( ) got into the public arena, cue faux meedja outrage (as if no-one else does same...), cue the politico still lying about it in public, cue the Wheels of Justice finally grinding out a verdict - and he gets done (backround here - BBC).

So far, so good, I hear you say - justice was done, a speed cheat was punished, what's the issue? (apart from the nagging worry that the only way the British seem to be able to get the Great and Good-gone-Bad into the clink is by going after minor misdemeanors like speeding and expenses rather than oh, lying to parliament, crashing the economy, fiddling the global LIBOR rate etc etc. Mind you, as Sophia Bennet reminded me, it was ever thus - Al Capone would be smiling wryly....).

But the point of this post is that the issue for digital media watchers to note is this one. Some of Huhne's teenage son's anguished private texts to his father were presented as evidence in court, but in such away that the Press were then allowed to publish them. And that the Press did then publish them, all over the front pages, despite there being no public interest at all. There are two major lessons from this, to mark very well:

1. You would have thought that this close to the Leveson Inquiry into phone hacking, what with the UK Free Press being under considerable pressure post-Leveson to form a self-regulation system that can constrain their excesses (or the State will do it for them), that they would have - now of all times - restrained themselves. That they just couldn't, just shows that they will always race for the bottom (news)feeding as fast as they can.

2. For the general public, the lesson (again) is that anything you put down, on any digital media, at any time - may find itself in a court of law and then splashed all over the newspapers, to be picked over by all and sundry*. As Tim Berners Lee noted yesterday, the emergence of permanent data retention is going to be a very, very bad thing for Jo Public unless some form of originator control is enshrined.

In the Olde Days of email, it used to be said that you should never write what you didn't want to be read out in a court of law. In Social Media days it needs upgrading to "you should never write what you don't want to be read out in a court of law, picked over by millions on social media, and stored forever on multiple databases". Episodes like this show that there clearly needs to be a far stronger discussion about the rights people need to have over their own data, especially if it is going to be stored and datamined into perpetuity. The new media tools are a wonderful thing, but there needs to be a new social contract, backed up legally, about how they handle private data. If the new technology becomes seen as Just More Big Brother, it won't be trusted, which will - eventually, one byte at a time - massively reduce if not kill its utility

*And I mean sundry - the poor kid is now being lambasted online for some of the words he chose in those private texts, in his anguish. O Tempora, O Mores...