Out of meeting with digital minister
Caroline Dinenage and tech cos on #onlineharms and transparency.
A few thoughts on this: first, transparency is the easy bit, we all agree we need evidence.
However, making transparency generate comparability is really hard, or in practice impossible. Platforms are different, practices are different, users are different.
What we really need is *evidence*: neutrally generated, independent academic evidence.
This extends to platform systems and algorithms.
There is an objection that academics take too long and are behind the game. Maybe — but academic research has been critical to
@openrightsgroup's understanding of many issues and frankly is often *ahead* of the policy curve.
There's also a tendency to manipulate evidence from groups that have special interests (especially but exclusively commercial ones). This often has to be exposed and refuted through academic, robust evidence.
But very few of the police and regulators that suspend domains have a public policy, regarding suspensions. As far as we know, there is no oversight mechanism.
@jim s/but exclusively/but not exclusively/ ?
@openrightsgroup
More: The Home Office needs to get the police, such as CTIRU at
the Met Police fully transparent and accountable, because today they are *not*.
The UK government needs to uphold the same standards as it demands.
We collect lots of evidence about
Home Office / UK Police non-transparency. For instance, they suspend .UK domains via Nominet in bulk. Statistics, we do have:
https://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Nominet/Domain_suspension_statistics